The process of setting the way banking, insurance and other financial services will be provided at post offices after 2017 has entered another stage. At its meeting today, Czech Post’s Supervisory Board discussed the results of the procedure for selecting a suitable partner for the provision of retail financial services. Czech Post now intends to enter into negotiations with the ČSOB Group whose bid was the most suitable across the entire range of offered services.

This step is based on a document acknowledged by the Czech Government on 7 April 2016. During April 2016, Czech Post approached major financial institutes active on the banking and insurance market and asked them whether they would be interested in potential cooperation. Czech Post also enabled other businesses that had not been approached directly to join the selection procedure. Business were allowed to submit joint bids with other businesses active on the financial services market.

The 15 candidates received detailed information from Czech Post about the conditions of the selection procedure. They were instructed to submit their binding bids in the course of July. The criterion applied by the evaluation board to the submitted bids was their economic advantage with respect to the estimated potential sales by Czech Post. The most advantageous bid recommended by the board was the one submitted by the ČSOB Group.

Czech Post assumes that the negotiations concerning the details of their future cooperation will continue until the beginning of the next year.

Additional information:

• In the process of selection of the most suitable partner, Czech Post has been using the legal support of BBH, a law firm specialised in banking, insurance and financial law. Deloitte Advisory contributed to the preparation and implementation of the selection process and evaluation of the economic advantages of individual bids.
• Czech Post is committed to the continued providing of a wide range of financial services. It has obtained rich experience in doing so over the almost 25 years of rendering banking services and 15 years of rendering insurance services.
• Czech Post runs a network of 3,200 post offices across the entire Czech Republic. You can find at least one post office in almost 2,500 municipalities. Every month, Czech Post carries out 1.6 million of retail financial transactions.