Punjab National Bank was registered on 19 May 1894 under the Indian Companies Act, with its office in Anarkali Bazaar, Lahore present day Pakistan. The founding board was drawn from different parts of India professing different faiths and a varied back-ground with, however, the common objective of providing country with a truly national bank which would further the economic interest of the country. PNB's founders included several leaders of the Swadeshi movement such as Dyal Singh Majithia and Lala Harkishan Lal, Lala Lalchand, Shri Kali Prosanna Roy, Shri E.C. Jessawala, Shri Prabhu Dayal, Bakshi Jaishi Ram, and Lala Dholan Dass. Lala Lajpat Rai was actively associated with the management of the Bank in its early years. The board first met on 23 May 1894. The bank opened for business on 12 April 1895 in Lahore.
PNB has the distinction of being the first Indian bank to have been started solely with Indian capital that has survived to the present. PNB has had the privilege of maintaining accounts of national leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawahar Lal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, as well as the account of the famous Jalianwala Bagh Committee.
Today, Punjab National Bank is an Indian multinational banking and financial services company. It is a state-owned corporation based in New Delhi, India. The bank has over 6,968 branches and over 9,935 ATMs across 764 cities. It serves over 80 million customers.
It has a banking subsidiary in the UK (PNB International Bank, with seven branches in the UK), as well as branches in HongKong,Kowloon,Dubai and Kabul. It has representative offices in Almaty (Kazakhstan), Dubai (UAE), Shanghai (China), Oslo (Norway) and Sydney (Australia). In Bhutan it owns 51% of Druk PNB Bank, which has five branches. PNB owns 20% of Everest Bank Limited, which has 50 branches in Nepal. Lastly, PNB owns 84% of JSC (SB) PNB Bank in Kazakhstan, which has four branches.