Banco Pichincha was established on 11 April 1906. Its first directors were Manuel Jijón Larrea (founding president), Manuel Freile Donoso and Ignacio Fernández Salvador (founding managers). Although it was a bank of note issue (the first issue, for one million
sucres, took place in February 1907), it focused on stockbroking. In 1986, the bank established an agency in
Miami, Florida. Since 1996, the bank has had a strategic alliance with Banco de Loja (est. 1967), to provide Banco Pichincha's clients coverage in southern Ecuador. The next year, it acquired Banco Financiero de Perú, which had been established in 1964 as a company specializing in construction financing, but which had become a full commercial bank in 1982. In 2001, Banco Financiero acquired NBK Bank, in Peru. In 2004, the bank established Banco Pichincha Panamá, which initially was based in Nassau, in the Bahamas, but which moved its head office to Panama. In 2001,
ABN AMRO sold the Ecuadorian operation it had inherited from its acquisition of
Hollandsche Bank-Unie to Banco Pichincha. Pichincha first arrived in Spain in 2007, where it now operates a network of nine customer-service centers mainly focused on attending to the more than 750,000 Ecuadorians who live in Spain. In 2010 it received permission from
Banco de España to establish a commercial bank. Pichincha plans to convert its customer service centers to branches, commencing with those in Madrid, and eventually to open another 20 branches over the next four years. In 2009, Pichincha acquired
AIG's operations in Colombia. These included the commercial lender, Inversora Pichincha. ==See also==