Bank of the Argentine Nation

The Bank of the Argentine Nation was founded on 18 October 1891 by President Carlos Pellegrini, with the purpose of stabilizing the nation's finances following the Panic of 1890; its first director was Vicente Lorenzo Casares. In its early decades it became a leading financing source for agricultural smallholders, and later for commercial and industrial businesses, as well as handling an array of public sector transactions.

The bank's reputation suffered after it was revealed that bribes had been received by the board of directors in 1994 when contacting IBM for the supply of computers, software, and communication equipment, becoming a prominent political scandal at the time.

Long a significant supplier of domestic lending in a credit-tight economy, the bank attempted—with only partial success—to revive the local credit market during the tenure of Gabriela Ciganotto, who stated the main goal of the bank in her inauguration speech in 2006 as "putting [the bank] at the service of production, especially small and medium businesses, and not of speculation."

In December 2006 the bank ranked 278th in the world in terms of tier one capital (US$ 1.623 billion, or 11% of deposits in December 2006) according to a global survey of top 1000 world banks carried out by The Banker, a Financial Times publication.

Domestically, it has long been Argentina's largest bank; in December 2011 it maintained 626 branches, US$30 billion in deposits (28% of the domestic total), and a loan portfolio of US$15 billion (20% of the domestic total). Its lending profile is less oriented toward consumer or mortgage lending than other leading banks in Argentina; one third of its outstanding credit is to the public sector and 80% of the remainder is allocated to commercial loans. The public bank is giving to the people divers credit such as UVA credit for house mortgage.