“The largest U.S. financial institutions conduct business around the world, maintaining a strong presence through branches and subsidiaries in foreign countries. This blog post highlights trends in their foreign ownership over the past twenty-five years, complementing recent research from the New York Fed on large and complex banks. We document a constant decline in the importance of foreign branches for U.S. financial institutions, an increase in the complexity of foreign subsidiary networks, and a shift of activity from Latin America and the Caribbean to Europe and other regions. The main data source for this blog post is the National Information Center (NIC), a depository of financial data and institutional characteristics of entities regulated by the Federal Reserve. With information from NIC, we can trace the organizational structure of all U.S. banking organizations over time, including the location of their foreign branches and subsidiaries. The database covers a broad range of institutions, including foreign banks, securities broker-dealers, and insurance companies. As of the end of 2014, we were able to link a total of 8,379 foreign entities, including 628 branches and 1,683 banking subsidiaries, to U.S. firms.”