Nov 20, 2007, 13:55 GMT
Munich - The Italian-owned bank UniCredit said Tuesday it would step up the pace of a push to attract Turkish people living in Germany as customers.
In the summer UniCredit's German division HypoVereinsbank took over and rebranded three branches of Turkish bank YapiKredi in th4e cities of Munich, Stuttgart and Cologne and went on to open Turkish- language counters at some of its own branches.
The division said in Munich that this had been such a success that it would by the end of this year have opened the counters in 10 of its branches instead of five as originally planned.
The counters, where bilingual staff speak Turkish and promote loans and investments to prosperous Turkish customers, are dubbed Yapi Corners. They offer brochures on banking products in Turkish.
Eight German cities with strong Turkish minorities will be covered. Turkish people have settled in Germany since the 1960s when there was a labour shortage in industry.
'The positive outcomes at our three new locations persuaded us to expand this service faster and more widely than we had initially planned to,' said a HypoVereinsbank senior executive, Willibald Cernko.
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