They have some 1200 branches with a total number of employees over 16000 in South East Europe and, if we include some other countries, primarily Cyprus and Turkey, the number is close to 27000; these are significant numbers for a region which is underbanked.
In around 8 years time, may be up to one-half of the profits of certain large Greek banks will be derived from their operations abroad and the rank of the Greek banks in the list of the European banks will continue to improve. All four major private Greek banking groups have been engaged in recent acquisitions abroad.