Who Owns First National Bank (FNB)?

FNB claims the title of South Africa's oldest bank through an unbroken institutional lineage beginning with the Eastern Province Bank, founded in Grahamstown in 1838 to finance the Cape Colony's wool export economy. When the Oriental Bank Corporation bought it in 1874 and then withdrew amid its own troubles, the Bank of Africa was formed in 1879 to carry the business forward.

Parallel threads merged into that lineage: the National Bank of the South African Republic, backed by the ZAR government during the gold rush era, and the National Bank of the Orange River Colony. These were consolidated into the National Bank of South Africa, which Barclays Bank acquired, folding the operation into Barclays DCO. In 1971 Barclays' South African operation merged with others to form Barclays National Bank, and in 1987, following Barclays' divestment under anti-apartheid pressure, the South African assets became First National Bank of Southern Africa.

The FirstRand era began in 1998 when Anglo American's financial services interests combined with Rand Merchant Bank Holdings to create FirstRand Limited, with FNB as its retail arm. Under CEOs Michael Jordaan and Jacques Celliers in the 2000s and 2010s, FNB became known as the country's most innovative bank: first with cellphone banking, first with a banking app, and early with eWallet, a service sending money to any mobile number that became a major financial inclusion product.

Today FNB operates as a division of FirstRand Bank Limited under CEO Harry Kellan. For the year ended June 2025 it delivered R33.6 billion in normalised profit before tax, up 7 percent, at a 37.4 percent return on equity, and passed the milestone of R1 trillion in customer deposits.