How to Build a European Banking Champion
Crunch together three banks and you have a plausible rival to the giants of Wall Street.
Mr Smith, a prize bulldog owned by W Hiscox of Purley.
Photographer: Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Earlier this month, my colleague Elisa Martinuzzi suggested that merging Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG would, on paper at least, create a European banking champion. She concluded, though, that the regulatory obstacles to such a deal would probably be insurmountable. But there is a three-way combination that could create a regional lender with the heft to take on the U.S. banks without falling foul of national regulators.
Jean Pierre Mustier has done much house-cleaning in his two years as chief executive officer of Italy's UniCredit SpA. So it’s not much of a stretch to posit that he might regard himself as the right leader to forge a European powerhouse. And while his current institution owns HypoVereinsbank in Germany, it still depends on Italy for almost half of its revenue.