mergers

On the heels of a story about Spanish giant Santander buying Alliance & Leicester in the UK, it comes as good news in the marketplace that another Spanish giant, BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria), is on the prowl as well.After…

Banco Santander of Spain is using the down market to snap up some UK assets on the cheap. It has announced the acquisition of Alliance & Leicester, the former building society which demutualised in 1997, for £1.3 billion ($2.6 billion)…

The FT reports: Citigroup is close to agreeing a sale of its German retail banking operations to Credit Mutuel for between €3bn and €5bn, after the French bank outbid Deutsche Bank in a close race, according to bankers close to the…

Fortis, the Dutch-Belgian banking giant under pressure to shed assets because of the credit crisis, has disposed of part of its ABN Amro acquisition. Deutsche Bank has acquired the assets for 709 million Euros, according to a report in the…

This is the latest M&A rumour making the rounds in financial circles. I caught this in Today's Financial News. And that may be the moment when National Australia Bank (NAB:Australia) makes a formal offer for the Australian branch…

Of all the merger decisions in the banking industry of late, BofA's decision to back Countrywide Financial is the most risky. The fallout from Countrywide only gets worse day by day. I am astounded that this deal is on track. BofA…

Wachovia has hired Goldman Sachs and UBS has hired Wachovia to help each with a 'strategic review.' For those in the financial services business, strategic review always means 'merger options'.Lazard has almost no business except its…

Now that it's come to light that Barclays went hat in hand to Japan to recoup some of the losses from its credit writedowns, one begins to understand that the Japanese banks are in a much better position today than their western…

Banco Santander, to date, has looked very robust as a financial institution in weathering the credit crisis. Despite significant exposure to bubble markets Spain and the UK, the company has not been required to write down a large amount of…

The word on the street is that Lloyd's TSB, one of the major British banks not hit hard by the mortgage crisis, may be considering a bid for Germany's Dresdner Bank, now owned by the insurance company Allianz. If this sale does in fact…