Financial services activities, by mode, in the Euro-Area, 2013 (% of the total)

In retail banking, (partial) integration simply never happened. The share of cross-border loans granted by monetary financial institutions (MFIs) – oversimplifying: banks – to non- MFIs was approximately equal to 3% in 1999, and remained steadily around that value, being equal to 5% in 2013. In other words, this means that – in 2013 – approximately 95% of the activities in retail banking took place within the national borders. These figures get even more cumbersome when realising that retail banking constituted more than the half (51%, Figure 7) of the Euro Area financial activities in 2013. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess from data, what kind of barriers exist at the retail level, and whether these might be addressed by policy-makers.