In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Ugandan banking industry underwent significant restructuring. Several indigenous commercial banks were declared insolvent, taken over by the central bank, and eventually sold or liquidated. These included the Uganda Cooperative Bank, Greenland Bank, the International Credit Bank, Teefe Bank, and Gold Trust Bank. The
Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) was initially privatized through a sale of its majority shares to a purported company from
Malaysia. It later became public, however, that the actual buyer was a partnership between Greenland Bank, which was insolvent at the time, and politically connected individuals. A second privatization sale was conducted, with the
Standard Bank of South Africa emerging as the winner. The privatized UCB was merged with the former
Grindlays Bank Uganda that the Standard Bank of South Africa already owned and had renamed Stanbic Bank (Uganda). The combined bank is now known as
Stanbic Bank Uganda Limited. As of 2008, Stanbic Uganda was the dominant commercial bank in Uganda, with about 27 percent of all bank assets and about 20 percent of all bank branches.
Nile Bank Limited, an indigenous institution, was acquired by the British
conglomerate Barclays in January 2007 and merged with its existing Ugandan operations to form the
Barclays Bank of Uganda. A moratorium on new commercial bank licences was declared in 2004 with the passage of a new banking bill in
Parliament, which established new banking institution classification guidelines. There are four classes of lending financial institutions under the new regulations as outlined below. ==Regulatory changes, 2007–2010==