Clubs and Consortia: European Banking Groups as Strategic Alliances

Abstract

Abstract European cooperation in the international banking market can be dated to the confluence of two crucial factors in the 1960s. The first of these is the challenge that American banks began to set their European counterparts from the early part of that decade. By following US-based multinational companies to Europe, and by competing aggressively with the European banks only not for American business, but also for the business of European multinationals, they were seen as predators in what had hitherto been a relatively peaceful and protected set of domestic markets. The European banks considered the incursions—or, more specifically, the tactics—of the Americans to be hardly ethical and they set about trying to find a way of combating this. Ongoing European integration represented the second explanatory factor for the development of international cooperation.