CEE's best bank for financing 2020: Societe Generale

Societe Generale’s footprint in CEE has changed dramatically over the last four years. At the start of 2016, the French group had one of the largest banking networks in the region, covering 13 countries from Albania to Georgia.

Today, it has commercial banking subsidiaries in just three CEE markets – Russia, Romania and Czech Republic – plus corporate and investment banking operations in Poland and Turkey. The group also maintains representative offices in Nursultan and Baku to service public-sector clients and commodity producers.

Societe Generale is the first of the big regional banks in CEE to adopt this targeted approach, selling up in smaller countries and those where the group had insufficient scale so that it can focus more tightly on the largest and most important markets.

While this has limited SocGen’s on-the-ground presence, however, it has not so far had a noticeable impact on the group’s ability to provide financing solutions to clients across CEE.

In debt capital markets it remained the clear leader among European banks for the number of Eurobond mandates executed in the current awards period, according to Dealogic, and behind only JPMorgan and Citi of the global players.