Good afternoon, Mr. Chair. Thank you again for having me, and thank you to the members of the committee.
My name is Eric Major. I'm the managing director, as the chair explained, of this specific program or division within the bank, called global investor immigration services. Let me just give you a brief overview of HSBC, for those of you who are not familiar with our organization.
We're headquartered in London. I think we're now one of the largest--if not the largest--financial services organizations in the world, with over 8,000 offices in 88 countries. The HSBC group is named after its founding member, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, which was in fact established in 1865 to finance the growing trade between Europe and China at the time.
We've been in this great country for 20 or 25 years, I believe, since the late 1980s. We have now 140 branches across the nation, making us, I believe, the largest foreign bank in this country.
As for the division that I head, essentially what my team and I do is assist our clients from around the world to migrate to this great country through this specific program called the immigrant investor program. It has a banking element to it. It has an investment element. The Government of Canada has brought financial institutions in to participate.
One of the interesting attributes we have is that we help families move to other countries. There are other countries in the world that also have similar types of programs but with different criteria. In fact, HSBC today facilitates migration. The greatest amount of migration is by far into Canada, but for the last five years now the second-greatest amount has been into the United Kingdom. Hong Kong as well, interestingly enough, has a program like this, as does Singapore. In fact, there are a number of countries that have it, but HSBC is involved with predominantly four right now.
I've been asked to comment on processing timelines, particularly as they relate to the federal program with which we're particularly involved, so I'll do that, although my friend Marc here has alluded to some of the issues that are arising there. Also, I'll give you a sense of the international marketplace, what other countries are doing, and how they're evolving.
One point is that each of these programs has its specific characteristics and its advantages and disadvantages, so it is somewhat challenging to compare one country to another. I believe you have with you now a table, an international comparison chart, in both French and English, which I tried to summarize neatly into one page so that you could try to get a sense of what the other--