Erste Group Bank AG is an Austrian financial service provider. It is one of the largest financial service providers in Central and Eastern Europe serving more than 16 million clients in over 2,000 branches in seven countries. Erste Group is headquartered in Vienna and operates as a universal bank. Erste Group is the central entity of the Sparkassengruppe Österreich and the Österreichischer Sparkassenverband. It has been designated as a Significant Institution since the entry into force of European Banking Supervision in late 2014, and as a consequence is directly supervised by the European Central Bank. The main shareholder of Erste Group is the non-profit ERSTE Foundation. In 1997, Erste Group went public and today the company is listed on the exchanges of Vienna, Prague and Bucharest and included in the indices CEETX, ATX and PX. Wikipedia