Our own history provides more than one example of this. The number of foreign intermediaries in Italy has risen continually in the last twenty-five years, from just over thirty in the mid-1980s to more than one hundred today. Their market share is significant.
In 2007, the latest year for which we have data for an international comparison, their share of total bank assets was 17.4 per cent, higher than the corresponding figures in Germany, France and Spain (11.1, 12.9 and 11.6 per cent, respectively).