Raiffeisen Bank International Logo

Raiffeisen Bank International traces its roots to Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, who founded a cooperative credit union in Anhausen in 1862 to give farmers, craftsmen, and workers an alternative to moneylenders. The first Austrian bank based on his model appeared in 1886. In 1927, Genossenschaftliche Zentralbank was created as the central clearing bank for Austria’s Raiffeisen network, starting with nine employees.

After the 1938 Anschluss, Austrian cooperatives were absorbed into the German system and were rebuilt in 1946 after World War II. In 1989, the central institution became Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich AG, or RZB. Its regional expansion had begun earlier: in 1986, RZB opened a subsidiary in Hungary, before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

That early move gave RZB a base in Central and Eastern Europe before rivals such as Erste Bank and Vienna Group expanded there. In the 1990s, it built banks in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia, usually through banking licenses and retail networks created from the ground up.

In 2005, the Central and Eastern European banks were placed into Raiffeisen International Bank-Holding AG and listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange, with demand exceeding supply 20 times. On 8 October 2010, Raiffeisen International merged with RZB’s corporate and investment banking unit to form Raiffeisen Bank International AG in Vienna. In 2017, RBI absorbed RZB. After February 2022, its Russian business became controversial: the ECB urged a faster exit, Ukraine listed the bank as an “international sponsor of war,” and, in 2022, it paid €559 million into Russia’s budget while the group’s profit exceeded €3 billion.