Boot, Arnoud --- "Financial Services: Consolidation and Strategic Positioning" [2004] ELECD 181; in Neumann, Manfred; Weigand, Jürgen (eds), "The International Handbook of Competition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: The International Handbook of Competition

Editor(s): Neumann, Manfred; Weigand, Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843760542

Section: Chapter 5

Section Title: Financial Services: Consolidation and Strategic Positioning

Author(s): Boot, Arnoud

Number of pages: 40

Extract:

5 Financial services: consolidation and
strategic positioning
Arnoud Boot



1 Introduction1
Liberalization and deregulation of financial markets have had a tremendous
effect on the financial services sector worldwide. An unprecedented wave
of restructuring and consolidation has swept through the United States
and Europe as well as Asia. Prominently figures the breath-taking scale of
consolidation in banking through mergers and acquisitions. For the USA
the consolidation of money center banks (for example the Chase Manhattan
and Chemical Bank merger, and the subsequent merger with J.P. Morgan),
the creation of regional megabanks (for example the expansion strategies
of BankOne and Nationsbank and their mergers with, respectively, First
Chicago/NBD and BankAmerica) may serve as examples in kind. And this
is not the end. The most recently announced mergers bring together the
merged banks that now operate under the name J.P. Morgan and BankOne,
and also involve a merger between BankAmerika (the entity that includes
Nationsbank and FleetBoston). On a domestic scale, Europe has seen some
spectacular mergers between large universal banks. Take, for example, the
acquisition of Paribas by Banque National de Paris (BNP) or the marriage
of the Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation. Also a few
cross-border mergers, such as the acquisitions across the Dutch­Belgian
border,2 or HSBC's acquisition of Crédit Commercial de France caught
public attention. Merger mania in Japan has created some of the world's
largest banks as ranked by book value of assets (for example, Mizuho,
...