Multinational Banking and the New Spanish Armada: An Inter-Temporal Co-Evolutionary Approach

Spanish banks, Group Santander and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) are becoming the new Spanish armada. These two banks are transforming themselves into large, efficient, and very profitable financial institutions across the globe. A host of internal factors in the 1980s, as well as external ones in the 1990s gave Spain a platform to engage in multinational banking activities parallel and supportive of foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explains the rise of Spanish banks qua multinationals in the global financial scene from its beginning in the early 1990s, accelerating in the latter part of the decade and early 2000s, within an inter-temporal co-evolutionary systems theory approach focusing on the micro-economic level strategic behavior of Spanish banks, while examining the macro-institutional and meso-level of the banking sector in which decisive national structural and industry qualitative changes have taken place and can be observed motivating domestic banks to expand overseas and to engage in asset exploiting while seeking more profitable markets.This paper was presented at the 18th International Conference of the International Trade and Finance Association, meeting at Universidad Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, May 21-23, 2008.