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Austrian banks have early taken advan-tage of Austria’s geographical proximity to the Central, Eastern and Southeast-ern European (CESEE) economies and expanded into the region over the past two decades. CESEE has been the key growth market for Austrian banks, which benefited strongly from the catching-up process in financial services. Having steadily reinforced their foreign business focus on the CESEE region, Austrian banks operated 63 fully con-solidated retail-oriented subsidiaries in 18 countries in CESEE with total assets of EUR 265 billion at year-end 2013. Compared with other Western Euro-pean banks, Austrian banks are among the biggest players, holding a market share of about 20 % in CESEE, while Italian, French and German banks hold shares of 17%, 15 % and 11%, respec-tively. Austrian banks ’ claims are larg-est on the Czech Republic, Croatia