Wiener Bankverein

The Wiener Bankverein or Bank-Verein (WBV, lit. 'Viennese Bank Union') was a major bank in the Habsburg Monarchy and the First Austrian Republic, founded in 1869. In 1888 it was the fourth-largest bank of Austria-Hungary by market capitalization, behind the Austro-Hungarian Bank, the Länderbank, and the Creditanstalt.^[1] It merged with the troubled Creditanstalt in 1934 to form Creditanstalt-Bankverein. Wiener Bankverein is thus one of the many predecessor entities of UniCredit, as the latter in 2005 acquired Bank Austria which itself had merged with Creditanstalt in 1997.^[2]