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Popular banking has taken many forms in the last two hundred years; from the savings banks of urban and industrial Europe, to the agricultural and credit cooperatives of more rural areas. The relationship between the popular and commercial banking sectors is crucial in understanding the contribution of financial systems to industrial and economic development in Europe over the last two centuries. It is also the case, however, that this relationship - and indeed the definitions of the 'commercial' and 'popular' systems - have been determined very largely by regulatory intervention. This has remained the case throughout the twentieth century, and the impact of regulation and state direction on banking systems in Eastern Europe remains to be fully explored. This collection represents a bringing together of conceptual/theoretical approaches to the emergence and development of popular banking, and a detailed set of studies examining the history of these institutions in a variety of contexts. It seeks, first, to define popular banking and second to understand its operation in a variety of contexts. The individual chapters are fully and explicitly cognisant of the differences between western European developments and those in eastern Europe, where often the rhetoric of 'popular' banking was very different from the reality: it also offers a set of comparisons between popular and commercial banking and seeks to locate the history of small scale, local banking and financial intermediation services in the wider history of financial institutions in Europe across the twentieth century. Lastly - in a chronological sense - it asks whether there is a future for such dedicated 'popular' banking services in a world dominated by globalized financial intermediaries. Based on papers delivered to the 2003 conference of the European Association for Banking History held in Bratislava, this volume offers an up-to-date and broad investigation into the role and impact of popular banking across Eastern and western Europe.