Mr. Niclaus Bergmann:

We had the opportunity to set up a new Sparkassen system in our own country after German reunification. We had to restart the Sparkassen system in the former GDR. In 1990, we really had to establish a new system over there. We had a good starting background with the common political and legal system, but nevertheless, it was a big challenge to establish new Sparkassen banks everywhere in the former east. This worked out pretty well, and after a year or a year and a half they had already broken even, so it was extremely successful. When we look at the former GDR now, we find many regions which have only Sparkassen banks and nothing else, so they are really successful. After that, we helped to restructure the savings bank system in almost all of the countries in eastern Europe. We helped to restructure the Russian Sberbank. We restructured the savings banks everywhere from the Baltic countries through Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. We set up a new savings bank in Serbia, for example. We did a lot of work from the mid-1990s to 2010.