Postbanken
Encyclopedia
Postbanken is a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
bank that is part of the DnB NOR Group
DnB NOR
DNB ASA is Norway's largest financial services group with total combined assets of more than NOK 2.0 trillion and a market capitalisation NOK 102 billion as per December the 31st. The Group includes brands such as DNB, Vital, Nordlandsbanken, Cresco, Postbanken, DnB NORD and Carlson...
. The bank offers its services through the Norwegian post offices
Posten (Norway)
Posten Norge or Norway Post is the name of the Norwegian postal service. The word posten means the post or the mail in Norwegian. The company, owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications holds a monopoly on distribution of mail throughout the country.-History:Posten was founded...
.
History
Postbanken was founded in 1948 after major political battle as Norges Postsparebank with the goal to incurate to savings, though the maximum amound allowed to be saved per person was set to NOKNorwegian krone
The krone is the currency of Norway and its dependent territories. The plural form is kroner . It is subdivided into 100 øre. The ISO 4217 code is NOK, although the common local abbreviation is kr. The name translates into English as "crown"...
10,000. In 1948 the bank had services provided at 3,600 post office
Post office
A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...
s and post outlets. The first loans were often large and given to investments in rural areas. Up until 1999 the bank was owned by the Government of Norway, but then it was merged with Den norske Bank
Den norske Bank
Den norske Bank or DnB was a Norwegian bank that existed between 1990 and 2003 when it merged with Gjensidige NOR to form the present DnB NOR...
, now DnB NOR. In 2001 the Postal Giro System was bought by Bankenes Betalingssentral
Bankenes Betalingssentral
Nets Group is the result of the merger in 2010 between PBS of Denmark and BBS and Teller of NorwayBankenes BetalingsSentral or BBS was a Norwegian company that provided centralised management of payment transactions, giro management and bank clearing....
and the year after the two giro
Giro
A Giro or giro transfer is a payment transfer from one bank account to another bank account and instigated by the payer, not the payee...
systems merged, making the 60 year old postgiro system history.