The story
The bank was founded in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Soon, branches were opened in Nairobi & Mombasa, Kenya and in Kampala, Uganda. When Tanzania nationalised private banks in 1967, the bank moved its headquarters to Nairobi. Following political changes in Uganda in 1971, the bank sold its assets in that country.
At the beginning, CBA was owned by a consortium of financial institutions known as Société Financière pour les Pays d'Outre-Mer (SFOM), based in Switzerland. Original members of the consortium included Banque Nationale de Paris, Bank Bruxelles Lambert, Commerzbank, and Bank of America. In 1980, Bank of America acquired 84% shareholding, effectively buying out all the other SFOM partners. Sixteen per cent shareholding in CBA remained in the hands of Kenyan investors. During the 1980s Bank of America divested from the bank, putting 100% shareholding in CBA in the hands of Kenyan nationals.
In December 2018, Commercial Bank of Africa Group (CBA Group) announced that it would be merging with NIC Group creating the Kenya's third-biggest bank. The Transaction was approved by the Kenyan regulators and shareholders in April 2019. On 27 September 2019, the Central Bank of Kenya approved the merger, effective 1 October 2019. Through the merger, the combined group, NCBA Group, was to consolidate their banking business. This led to the transfer of business to one entity renamed NCBA Bank Kenya Limited.
From Wikipedia’s article on Commercial Bank of Africa, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3