Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Punjab National Bank
Punjab National Bank is an Indian bank that takes deposits and lends money to individuals and businesses.
Punjab National Bank is one of India's oldest and largest public-sector banks. It takes in deposits from millions of ordinary people and lends that money out — to farmers buying seeds, to small shopkeepers stocking their shelves, to big companies building factories, and to families taking out a home loan. It also offers the everyday plumbing of finance: savings accounts, debit cards, remittances, insurance, and wealth products. Its headquarters are in New Delhi, and it runs a vast branch network across India, with some international offices too.
Here's the basic engine. A bank earns most of its money on the gap between what it pays depositors and what it charges borrowers — the spread. If it pays 4% on a savings account and lends at 9%, that difference, minus costs and bad loans, is the profit. The other major piece is fee income from things like insurance distribution, mutual funds, and transaction services. For a bank this large, the health of its loan book matters more than almost anything else: every loan that goes bad is money that may never come back. PNB carries real history and real scars. It was founded in 1894 in Lahore, and it played a role in India's freedom movement — Mahatma Gandhi's first imprisonment in India came at a PNB-linked gathering in Champaran. More recently, in 2018, the bank was at the center of one of India's biggest banking frauds, involving fraudulent letters of undertaking routed through the bank's Brady House branch in Mumbai. That scandal, plus a pile of bad loans across India's public banks, forced a painful cleanup. The government stepped in with capital, and the bank merged with two other public banks, Oriental Bank of Commerce and United Bank of India, in 2020, becoming one of the country's largest lenders by branch count.
Today the story is about recovery and scale. PNB is majority-owned by the Indian government, which shapes both its mission — serve the wider economy, including priority sectors like agriculture and small business — and its constraints, since public banks answer to political priorities as well as shareholders. Its main rivals are other big Indian banks, like State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, and private players such as HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank. The bank's recent focus has been cleaning up bad loans, growing retail lending, and improving digital services, with profits recovering as asset quality improves.
Saved answer · last researched 12 Nov 2026