Over the past decade, Greece's leading banks have expanded into south-east Europe. To remain competitive, however, they will now need to weather the financial storm and continue to focus on increasing their presence in the Balkans and the rest of eastern Europe. Writer Kerin Hope

Bulgaria’s foreign-owned banks are attempting to speed up the transition to EU accession, bringing a huge growth in retail banking. But there are still problems to resolve, Tom Blass reports.

Russia is beginning to tackle more fundamental problems with its economy. With advice from Germany’s KfW, it is boosting its banking system. Ben Aris reports from Moscow.

Raiffeisenbank Bulgaria
Momtchil Andreev, CEO

With more than 83% of Bulgaria’s banking assets under the control of foreign banks or financial institutions, who has gained from the country’s banking privatisation in the past decade?

With plans to sign an accession agreement next year, Bulgaria is preparing itself to become a EU member. Nick Kochan reports from The Banker’s conference.
Bulgaria has moved centre stage among the nations of central Europe. In due course, this will translate into a seat at the EU members’ table, perhaps as early as 2007. These considerations are driving Bulgarian economic and structural policy today.
That was clear at The Banker business conference, Banking on Bulgaria, held recently in London and sponsored by investment fund Equest. Solomon Passy, Bulgaria’s foreign affairs minister, told the conference that his government had two priorities when it came to power three years ago: the first was membership of NATO, which was achieved shortly after the election; the second was to prepare the country for EU membership.

Measuring GDP is an extremely complex and error-prone process. Investment pay-outs on bonds should be based on criteria that are definitive and easy to measure. For that reason, linking payments to the growth in a country’s GDP could never be anything other than challenging even though the sense of the idea (you pay more when you earn more) is indisputable.