The Regional Nature of World Banking

Abstract

Of the forty banks included in the world’s largest 500 firms, none operate on a global basis. All but one are heavily dependent on their home region, with an average of 78.3% of their sales being intra-regional. The other bank is European owned but has a majority of its sales in North America, i.e. it is host-region oriented. The insularity of the world’s largest banks is not a sector-specific factor—only nine of the world’s 500 largest firms are global, and the vast majority are like the banks, home-region based.regional, triad, banking, intra-regional, global