John Hourican: BoC Excited about the Possibility of a Cyprus Solution

John Hourican, CEO of Bank of Cyprus, talked to Guy Johnson on Bloomberg Television’s “On The Move” this week, explaining what a unified Cyprus will mean for the company and the country as a whole.
When you look at what the opportunity is in a unified Cyprus for your bank, what is it? There are 500,000 people in what is referred to as the occupied northern territory of Cyprus and there are 800,000 people in the south so there’s an immediate opportunity of 500,000 more people to bank. There’s an opportunity actually to deploy a modern banking sector into Cyprus in the north as we unify the island; there’s a whole series of Foreign Direct Investment that’s likely to occur in a reunified Cyprus. The politics of it today looks good; the economics of it still needs to be worked out and carefully charted but we’re excited about it.