European banking seems to be heading for the rough waters of merger and take-over activity. Spanish bank Banco Santander Central Hispano (SCH) completed the process of taking over the British home-loan bank Abbey National on November 12 and last week it emerged that Italian bank Sanpaolo IMI and French-Belgian bank Dexia were holding merger talks.
European banking went through upheavals and restructuring in the late 1980s and 1990s. In France, for example, privatisation was a driving factor.
In Britain many home-loan or mutual banks floated themselves on the stock market and then became bidders or targets. However British banks in general, once present in banking throughout the world, have concentrated on their home market having experienced some high-profile failures of international expansion, notably in the United States.
Italian banking began to consolidate, as did banks in the Nordic region following a wave of financial problems. Spanish banking has emerged as an aggressive force in Europe.
In Germany there are periodic bouts of angst over take-over and merger talk. In March it was reported that some big German companies had written to the government expressing concern that Deutsche Bank might be the target of foreign take-over.
During the 1990s and after 2000 technological change forced banks to streamline and change their operations: some ventured into online banking.
And a central force behind several mergers/take-overs in the second half of the 1990s was the programme to launch the euro.
Some banks realised early on that their strategy should be to break out of traditional national markets in order to be able to offer their customers a complete range of services wherever they expanded in taking advantage of the opportunities to compete opened up by removal of currency frontiers.
Another factor for change is a trend throughout European business: shareholders are pressing for increasing accountability from managers. However rationalisation usually involves heavy job cuts and therefore political sensitivities in some countries.
In some countries, France for example where banking is seen as being akin to a public service, or in Germany where banks have traditionally been long-term shareholders in the companies they support, pressure and criticism from shareholders - notably foreign investment funds - is new.
But European banking, although concentrated in France and Britain, remains relatively fragmented overall. In some countries there continue to be nationalistic objections to incursions by foreign banks.
Comments
Comments are closed.