ABN Amro/Alfred Berg: Nordic power with a global reach
Swedish bank Svenska Handelsbanken, is known in the market for an expansion strategy that avoids full mergers. It's not an entirely accurate reputation: it acquired Swedish mortgage company Stadshypotek in late 1996 for Skr23 billion ($2.9 billion) in the largest cash deal ever in Sweden. The previous year it had acquired Finnish bank Skopbank - "the healthy parts", as the bank's official history now has it - and in the 1990s it also acquired Norwegian banks Oslo Handelsbank and Stavanger Bank, and Swedish bank Skanska Banken. Handelsbanken now has 482 branches in Sweden and 30 elsewhere in the Nordic region; it considers itself the largest bank in the Nordic countries and, locally, the fourth-largest commercial bank in Finland and the fifth in Norway. Profits increased 16% to Skr4.4 billion in the first half of 1998.
The key word at Handelsbanken is universal: it wants to cover financial services from corporate transactions to basic retail and consumer banking, life assurance, investment banking and trading.
Handelsbanken Markets handles corporate finance, trading in the equity, money and foreign exchange markets, debt capital financing, correspondent banking and trade finance.