The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has announced that Diamond Trust Bank of Kenya Limited shall acquire small-sized bank, Habib Bank (K) Limited (HBL) which was last year ranked 33 out of 41 banks with a market share of 0.34 percent.
CBK stated, “The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals in Kenya and Pakistan.”
DTB was founded in 1946 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania as the Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust with branches in Kenya and Uganda and was later split into three separate entities in 1965. In 1972 the Kenyan arm was renamed Diamond Trust of Kenya as a community based non-bank financial institution, and in 1997 converted into a commercial bank and renamed Diamond Trust Bank (DTB), focusing mainly on corporate business. Subsequently, in March 1999, it merged with Premier Savings and Finance Limited.
Today it’s a bustling fully-fledged, public-quoted commercial bank, ranked sixth out of 41 banks with a market share of 6.1 percent as of December 31, 2016, and has sixty-one branches throughout Kenya.
Founded in 1941, HBL became Pakistan’s first commercial bank before its head office moved to Karachi (Pakistan) in 1947. In 1951 it opened its first international branch in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It then reached Kenya in 1956, when it opened its first branch in Mombasa and has been operating ever since, currently with six branches nationwide.
For DTB to make this transaction possible with Habib Bank, who is already a shareholder of the bank, the sixth best loaning institution will have to form 13,281,105 new shares at a price of KShs. 137.39 per share. CBK said the transaction should be completed by July this year, with the regulator claiming that it would provide specific details of the acquisition as the transaction continues.