Blade Watch

http://www.sundayherald.com/business/businessnews/display.var.2050526.0.0.php

AT THE ABN Amro head office in Zuidas – Amsterdam’s futuristic new business hub on the southern outskirts – lights burn long into the night. The area was planned in the 1990s around this monument to Dutch financial power. That centrepiece has now fallen. The building is now field headquarters to a Scottish-led invasion force.

Right now the ABN building is occupied by Mark Fisher, previously the Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) back-office wizard, picked by RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin as interim chairman of the ABN holding group on November 1 last year. He and RBS’s crack integration team now occupy the plushest offices.

Eventually the building will be be inherited by Fortis, the Benelux lender which, along with RBS and the Spanish Banco Santander, formed the hostile consortium that bought ABN Amro for £49 billion last October. The biggest bank deal in history – and arguably the worst-timed – it trumped a friendlier £43.7bn bid by RBS’s UK rival Barclays.

In the midst of the worst financial turmoil seen for a generation, Fisher and co are awaiting permission from the Dutch central bank to divide the spoils of the Dutch giant in pursuit of a promised £1.2bn of cost savings.

Check out this article which is talking about the ongoing merger of the ABN Amro group into the consortium banks, it will be interesting to see what announcements are made this year.

Will the integration include integrating the business lines, the IT infrastructure not to mention the business processes etc?

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