The time is ripe for more merger and acquisition (M&A) activity in Europe’s banking sector. After some 10 years of wariness of ‘too big to fail’ financial institutions among regulators and politicians, the mood is changing.
It is possible to have too much of a good thing – as regulators such as Danièle Nouy, the European Central Bank’s (ECB's) chair of the supervisory board, agreed when she referred to overbanking in Europe in a speech in September 2017. There are too many banks competing for customers and many lenders are not earning their cost of capital.
