Study On Motives And Performance Of International Banking Mergers And Acquisitions

Since 1990s,the international banks' trends towards Mergers and acquisitions have become more obvious due to the development of financial liberalization and MNCs development,deregulation and the information technology.Data provided by Amel et al.(2004) indicate that most of the M&A activity in the financial sector between 1990 and 2001 involved banking firms,accounting for nearly 53%of all mergers in the financial sector(with 8,144 bank acquisitions among a total of 15,502 financial mergers),representing a value of $1,835 billion,approximately 168%of the total value of financial M&As($2,693.9 billion).Thus,it is not surprising,as Sobek (2000) claims that during the second half of the 1990s,the most frequent words used in reports on banking were "merger" and "acquisition".The increasing tension of bank mergers and acquisitions aroused wide public concern among the academic community.Since 1990s,especially in the last few years, the research on bank mergers came forward in great numbers.Many scholars discussed extensively concerning the background,motives and effects of bank mergers,and they came up with many striking thoughts.Most of them focused on the motives and performance of bank M&A.However,given the existing research results, there is still not a common conclusion on performance.The aim of this paper is to analyze the performance improvement in great detail. Although this paper is focused on mergers and acquisitions,it is not research merger itself.As noted above,it study the theories,motives and the performance improvement of M&A.This is on the basis of the positive performance impact of the 1990s.Although there are numerical failing M&As cases,they are not the major research aspects.On the basis of numerical data and ideas of other essays,this paper analyzes the performance of international bank M&As,and studies the typical bank merger cases such as JP Morgan Chase and Bank One Corp,HSBC Holdings plc and Household International,NBG and SB,Development Bank in Singapore and Post Office Bank in Singapore.