The financial services sector is about halfway through one of the most
dramatic periods of restructuring ever undergone by a major industry—
a reconfiguration whose impact has carried well beyond shareholders of
the firms involved into the domain of regulation and public policy as well
as global competitive performance and economic growth. Financial services
have therefore been a center of gravity of global mergers and acquisitions
activity. The industry comprises a surprisingly large share of the
value of merger activity worldwide.
In this book I have attempted to lay out, in a clear and intuitive but
also comprehensive way, what we know—or think we know—about reconfiguration
of the financial services sector through mergers and acquisitions
(M&A). This presumed understanding includes the underlying
drivers of the mergers and acquisitions process itself, factual evidence as
to whether the basic economic concepts and strategic precepts used to
justify M&A deals are correct, and the efficacy of merger implementation—
notably the merger integration dynamic.
Chapter 1 describes the activity-space occupied by the financial services
industry, with a discussion of the four principal businesses comprising
the financial services sector—commercial banking, investment banking,
insurance, and asset management. This description includes profiles of
subsectors such as retail brokerage, insurance brokerage, private banking,
and wholesale banking, and how they are linked in terms of the functions
performed. The objective of this introductory chapter is to provide a
“helicopter” overview of the financial services businesses engaged in restructuring
through mergers. The chapter provides some background for
readers not fully familiar with the industry or (as it often the case) familiar
only with a relatively narrow segment of the industry.
Chapter 2 positions financial servicesM&Adeal-flow within the overall
context of global mergers and acquisitions activity, assessing the structure
of M&A volume in terms of in-market and cross-market dimensions (both
functionally and geographically). It considers North American, European,
and selected Asian financial services transactions in order to provide a
context for discussing the underlying causes of structural changes in the
industry, often under very different economic and regulatory conditions.