The movement to create rural cooperative banks initiated in Germany by
Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen spread to the
Habsburg Monarchy in 1886, two years before Raiffeisen's death, with the establishment of the country's first
Raiffeisenkasse at
Mühldorf near
Spitz in
Lower Austria. The movement first national representative body was founded in 1898 under the name
Allgemeiner Verband landwirtschaftlicher Genossenschaften in Österreich (). As Austria became a separate republic in 1918, more than 2000 local Raiffeisen banks were present on the new country's territory. In 1927, a central financial institution was created the
Genossenschaftliche Zentralbank, later renamed
Raiffeisen Zentralbank Österreich. In the following decade, the group built up its network of regional banks. Following the
Anschluss in 1938, the Austrian Raiffeisen banks were subsumed into the German cooperative financial group. The separate Austrian group was recreated in the postwar era, with the
Allgemeiner Verband re-established in 1946 and renamed in 1960 as
Österreichischer Raiffeisenverband. The group's international expansion started in 1986 with the creation of a first banking subsidiary in
Hungary. In 1989, the
Genossenschaftliche Zentralbank was renamed
Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB). By 2003, the group had expanded to 15 central and eastern European countries. The international activities were brought together into
Raiffeisen International Bank-Holding AG, which went public in 2005 and was merged into the new RBI entity in 2010. In 2017, RBI in turn absorbed its parent company RZB, thus resulting in a more streamlined group structure. ==Members==