Do foreign banks perform better than domestic banks in host developing economies? Relying on financial statements and survey data I compare the performance of three different categories of foreign banks to the group of domestic banks in sub-Saharan Africa: global banks from developed countries, regional African banks and banks from non-African emerging economies. While emerging-market banks and global banks consistently outperform domestic banks, the difference is not significant for regional African banks. The higher performance of global banks and emerging-market banks is related to higher operational efficiency and lower cost of funding, while there is no strong evidence of segmentation by business segment in the loans market. Regional African banks, which started their foreign expansion more recently, are less able to generate interest income compared to domestic banks. These findings highlight the importance of taking into account foreign banks’ heterogeneity when assessing the impact of financial FDI on the host economy.

This paper examines how internal capital flows inside multinational banks create global financial interconnections, relying on a novel database on foreign banks operating in South Africa. Using the event of the East Asian crisis, I find that foreign affiliates’ balance sheet face “reversal of fortune” when other members of their banking group need large amounts of internal capital to cushion capital losses, leading to an abrupt reallocation of internal capital across countries. At the same time, an increase of the volume of internal funding received is shown to cause an expansion of credit to the local private sector.