Grupo Financiero Banamex S.A. de C.V. has its origins and is the owner of the Banco Nacional de México or Citibanamex (formerly Banamex). It is the second-largest bank in Mexico. The Banamex Financial Group was purchased by Citigroup in August 2001 for $12.5 billion USD. It continues to operate as a Citigroup subsidiary. History Banamex was formed on 2 June 1884 from the merger of two banks, Banco Nacional Mexicano and Banco Mercantil Mexicano, which had operated since the beginning of 1882. The newly founded bank had branches in Mérida, Veracruz, Puebla, Guanajuato and San Luis Potosí, and opened a branch in Guadalajara. After the start of World War I, the French managers of the bank left Mexico. After 10 years, Agustín Legorreta Ramírez who served as acting president managed to revive the bank. Following its reorganization, the bank collaborated with Banco de Mexico and US government officials. By 1937, 36 out of 50 bank branches in Mexico were owned by Banamex. Banamex gradually introduced several financial product innovations to the Mexican market including the first credit cards in 1968 and an ATM banking system in 1972. In 1977, Grupo Banamex was formed by merging the bank with its investment and mortgage assets. Four years later, Banamex acquired the California Commerce Bank. During a severe economic crisis in 1982, then Mexican president José López Portillo announced a major devaluation of the peso and nationalized all private banks in Mexico. For the next nine years, Banamex operated as a government-owned national credit association. In 1991, Banamex was reprivatized and it established Grupo Financiero Banamex–Accival with the investment bank Acciones y Valores de México (Accival). It had 720 branch offices, 31,797 employees, assets of $26.2 billion and a customer base of four million people making it the largest financial group in Latin America at the time. As a result of the private credit aggressive expansion in Mexico, resulted in a strain of the bank's balance sheet (loan portfolio quality ratios and capitalization ratios). The December 1994 macro-devaluation of the Mexican pesos and the ensuing significant increase in domestic interest rates coupled with a dramatic economic recession, caused Banamex's and much of the rest of the privatized banks to essentially become insolvent. In order to avoid the potentially catastrophic effects of generalized bank bankruptcies, the Ernesto Zedillo administration decided to rescue the troubled banks through a government fund (Instituto de Protección al Ahorro