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Intesa Sanpaolo invests in Eastern promise: Looking East

Intesa Sanpaolo rose to prominence as Italy's largest bank after a series of domestic mergers and takeovers, and has improved its status further with a raft of selective acquisitions in central and eastern Europe, writes David Lane in Rome.Corrado Passera, Intesa Sanpaolo's managing director
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Intesa Sanpaolo invests in Eastern promise: Looking East

With its 33 foreign branches and representative offices, Banca Commerciale Italiana was arguably the most international Italian bank when the 20th century ended. This Milanese bank had a global reach. On the western side of the Atlantic, it had a presence in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Latin America, while on the other side of the world it reached to cities such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei and Tokyo. Banca Commerciale Italiana was at the centre of banking for the industries and firms that for many decades looked to Milan as Italy's industrial and financial capital.

From the south of Italy, Banco di Napoli had accompanied another kind of enterprise abroad. Between 1881 and 1900, poverty forced 1.5 million penniless rural labourers, mostly from the Mezzogiorno, to seek fortunes far from home, mainly in the Americas. A further 4 million followed in the next 15 years and Naples became Europe's busiest passenger port. Banco di Napoli opened an office in New York in 1901 and eight years later, when it decided that a branch was needed to handle the remittances that Italians sent home, the Italian population of New York amounted to about 600,000 people.

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