While the country had its eyes fixed on the saga of HSBC’s protracted sale last year, another major local bank was quietly changing ownership, with MeDirect being sold to Czech company Creditas Group last September.
Creditas Group CEO Jiří Hrouda has now revealed how the group secured the deal, its plans for MeDirect’s future and possible new investments in Malta.
A happy coincidence
Hrouda first came across MeDirect “by coincidence” while holidaying in Malta in the summer of 2024, when he received a call from a friend who happened to know that the bank was up for sale.
“My colleagues always make fun of me, saying that whenever I go on holiday, I go and buy a bank. It has only happened twice,” he smiles.
Creditas had been looking for new opportunities to expand its operations, but Malta was not initially on its radar until that point, he said.
“Our focus was western Europe, but we wanted to avoid bigger economies like France and Germany,” Hrouda explained. “There are also some countries where we thought the regulatory environment was not very favourable for foreign acquisitions, so we crossed those off our list”.
Hrouda said the group had been looking for something “which is focused on investments and heavy on tech”.
“Almost by coincidence, we found MeDirect, which ticked all our boxes.”
For one thing, Hrouda said, Malta is ideally placed for what he describes as “tailored banking,” a style of banking in which MeDirect aims to specialise.
“It’s just like when you go to a tailor to customise a suit,” Hrouda explains. “Traditional banks typically have product lines, but if you’re a client with slightly unusual requirements, you often find it hard to get served by a traditional bank”.
Hrouda argues that “this is exactly an ideal business model for a country like Malta where there are many talented entrepreneurs with lots of ideas who are, from our perspective, relatively underbanked”. He brushes off the suggestion that Malta’s reputational struggles over the past years, culminating in its short-lived 2021 FATF greylisting, could have represented a downside to the deal.
Hrouda said the group “didn’t see a lot of downsides” at the time of the deal, except for the odd quirk, jokingly adding “there aren’t many flights between Malta and Prague, that’s a problem”.
The first Maltese systemic bank to be sold
However, Hrouda said there was one issue which the group “was not particularly fond of” – MeDirect being classified as a systemic bank, meaning its sale had to be green-lit by the European Central Bank before it could be signed off.
MeDirect was the first local bank to undergo this scrutiny, with HSBC (another of Malta’s three systemic banks, BOV being the third) currently facing the same process, as its sale goes under the ECB’s knife.
Hrouda describes the additional ECB oversight as “a necessary evil,” saying it “brings additional complexities” to the acquisition.
Nevertheless, he said, things moved smoothly, with the whole acquisition process being “very quick compared to others”.
“The whole process kicked off in August 2024, with the transaction and due diligence process lasting until the end of November,” he said. “Then we started the complex regulatory process which ran between December 2024 and June 2025”.
All formalities were finalised in August 2025 – “almost exactly a year after we started” – with the bank officially changing hands in September.
“It may seem like a long time, but we were told we were relatively quick,” Hrouda said. Nevertheless, the group faced some initial scepticism.
“It may sound derogatory, but we are still perceived as Eastern European as opposed to, let’s say, developed Europe,” he said. “So there was a level of caution about us being the new shareholder of an important European bank”.
Banking, property and energy
Hrouda said MeDirect hopes to bring a new sense of speed and flexibility to Malta’s banking ecosystem, offering something different to Malta’s banking behemoths.
Look at how long it typically takes to open a bank account, he said, by way of example.
“We’re looking to introducing something which would give our customers something like a 48-hour timeline to open an account. It’s a big promise compared to our competitors.”
The group, which also operates property and energy arms abroad, is also eyeing the prospect of expanding beyond banking in Malta, Hrouda said.
Creditas is already “actively looking” at some real estate opportunities in Malta, he said.
“The intention today is not to build a development company here,” Hrouda said. “But we are very happy to explore opportunities with partners to invest into residential development.”
There could also be opportunities in the energy sector, where Creditas specialises in battery storage systems, Hrouda said, arguing that Malta is “perfectly positioned” for more investment in solar, wind and tidal energy.
“Theoretically, we would be delighted to do that but we haven’t actually explored it yet because we have our hands full,” he said.
