Western Europe regional awards
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Best Bank: ING |
While arch-rival ABN Amro has been busy fending off calls for its break-up and planning a merger with the UK’s Barclays Bank, ING has been making steady progress at home and abroad. In the Netherlands ING has announced plans to integrate its two retail branch networks, ING Bank and Postbank, to take advantage of Postbank’s low cost structure and internet banking offering and bring ING Bank’s broader product range to Postbank’s client base.
Abroad, ING has achieved remarkable success with its ING Direct internet bank, which has become a top 10 retail bank measured by deposits and customer liabilities in every country it operates in except the US, where it ranks 28th.
Although ABN Amro maintains by far the best across-the-board league table position in the Netherlands, Lehman Brothers has built up an excellent Dutch franchise that has scored substantial successes over the past year, and that deserves recognition.
The US bank was sole bookrunner on the largest IPO of the year, the €1.4 billion IPO of Dutch bank SNS Real, and joint bookrunner on several of the year’s other most notable deals, including repeat mandates from clients Tomtom and Wavin.