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From his corner office on the 22nd floor of the Barcelona headquarters of savings bank La Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions, Juan María Nin can gaze at various artifacts of his heritage. Looking east through the plate-glass windows, he can see the power station that his paternal grandfather, an engineer, once operated alongside the city’s Mediterranean port; Nin’s father, also an engineer, grew up in a small house on the plant’s grounds. Looking north toward Barcelona’s upper town , Nin can see the apartment building in which he was raised. No wonder the 55-year-old chief executive feels so at home here.

Just don’t mistake the cozy familiarity for provincialism. Nin is embarking on a bold expansion drive to take La Caixa far beyond its Catalan roots. Using the proceeds of a November 2007 IPO of La Caixa’s industrial holdings, the veteran banker has shelled out some €2.3 billion ($3.4 billion) to buy minority stakes in Bank of East Asia, a Hong Kong lender that’s pushing headlong across the border into China, and Grupo Financiero Inbursa, a Mexican financial services company controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim. Nin is also looking to snap up retail banks in the U.S. and Eastern Europe, while at home he moves into corporate banking and wealth management. He intends to transform La Caixa, Spain’s most profitable retail bank, into a global institution with the swagger and breadth to rival bigger compatriots like Banco Santander and Grupo BBVA.

“Our long-term aim is to keep performing well in the retail markets that have always been our specialty,” Nin told Institutional Investor in a recent interview at his office. But international expansion, combined with the new business lines in Spain, he insists, “will be the turbos behind the long-term growth of La Caixa.”

Such an ambitious agenda would be risky in the best of times, but Nin is pursuing his global quest in the midst of the worst financial crisis in a generation and with a management team that has little experience outside Iberia. “La Caixa has a great record, but the truth is that it wasn’t hard to compile,” says Jens Peters, a portfolio manager who runs €2 billion in assets at KBC Asset Management in Dublin. He notes that bank credit in Spain grew 25 percent annually over the past ten years and deposits grew by 15 percent a year. “The big question now is how easy will it be for La Caixa to transpose its model to new areas both in the increasingly crowded domestic market and internationally, where they are largely untested.”

Nin’s domestic market, moreover, is deteriorating rapidly, as the credit crisis deflates Spain’s real estate boom. Housing sales have fallen sharply in recent months, and prices have started to drop as well, casting a pall over the construction-dependent economy. In July the government slashed its growth forecast for the second time this year, to just 1.6 percent, which would be down from the 3.8 percent rise recorded in 2007. The slumping economy poses a serious threat to profitability at La Caixa; mortgages account for 70 percent of the bank’s €165.6 billion loan book. That threat was underscored dramatically in July when Martinsa-Fadesa, a property developer to which La Caixa had extended

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