On April 18, 1997 The Group has formally changed its name for the Civil Society Banking SA to ABSA on January 8, 1998, the group again changed its name to Grupo Aval Acciones y Valores SA After This year, Grupo Aval introduces the Library Electronic Banking, which is integrated with other Group entities, Banco de Bogota, Banco de Occidente, Banco Popular and Banco AV Villas. This innovation was supposed to customers who previously used their other channels of financial services for transactions in real-time Internet or in any of the offices of banks in the group, or through ATMs.The greatest achievement of the group happens in 1999 when Grupo Aval out the stock market in the newly created Stock Exchange of Colombia (The Colombian Stock Market) for the first time in company history. And that's when the group makes a massive bid for public participation in the group of ordinary, with 1,200,774,970 shares in the common market after stock between November 1 and December 31, 1999. By December 31, 1999, was owned 40.042 Aval shareholders. The end result of the IPO was the sale of 312,062,341 common shares on the stock market, the 2.58 percent of its total shares, with a valuation of 58,190,135,296 Colombian peso.In 2000, a proposal is made for the appearance of the shares of Grupo Aval in the listing of the New York Stock Exchange but were later postponed, due to bad business climate on Wall Street for emerging economies found in the time. In 2007, Luis Carlos Sarmiento continues as manager of the group companies, assisted by his son Luis Carlos Sarmiento Gutierrez, who will assume control of their time on the business of the conglomerate.
