"Bank tier or size — that is, the size of the bank in relation to other banks — depends on the relative size to the overall banking market in terms of total banking assets as provided by the balance sheet of the bank. This type of comparison – across tiers – makes sense in relation to a particular country or region that define that specific banking marketplace. For this reason Gartner has preferred to adopt a localized definition of bank tiers that depends on 11 different regions that cluster together countries of similar economic and business homogeneity and avoid a generic global definition of bank tiers that would not allow proper comparison between the largest banks of different regions."