 The alliance was founded in 1997 as Eika Gruppen as a consequence of the new trends in Norwegian banking.Previously there had been a massive merging among Norwegian savings banks, resulting in a number of regional savings banks, the largest of these being Sparebanken NOR that was a merger between a total of more than one hundred banks.In 1996 a lot of the other large, regional banks formed an alliance called SpareBank 1 to provide an umbrella for their operations.