All of the profit of International Retail and Commercial Banking (IRCB) comes from outside the United Kingdom, and that profit has been significantly increased by the Absa transaction.
The customer base of IRCB grew significantly during 2005 as a result of the acquisition of Absa, which added over 7 million new customers to the Group. This transaction was the largest investment we have ever made outside the UK. Absa is a very good bank, and it is performing strongly. The expected synergies with our pre-existing South African activities, and the introduction into Absa of specialist skills in the areas of investment banking, small and mid-corporate banking and credit cards, make us confident that Absa represents a significant source of earnings growth for our shareholders in the future.
Outside Absa, the rest of the IRCB portfolio performed strongly. In particular, we continue to make rapid progress with our Spanish business, where the integration of Banco Zaragozano is proceeding well. This represents another example of where we can take a strong retail and commercial banking platform, develop it by acquisition, and use it to introduce additional service offerings to our customers through collaboration with Barclays Capital, Barclays Global Investors and Barclaycard. We felt very confident that we were buying well when we acquired Zaragozano, and as our Spanish profits grow, we feel that our confidence was well founded.
The Barclays brand travels well. For example, over the past 18 months, we've opened three branches a month in Portugal. We now have 70 branches there and we plan to open a further 30 in 2006. We also intend to open branches in Italy during 2006.
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