Private banking: the investment banks muscle in

The deal is the latest sign of increased investment banking interest in private banking. It's no surprise that investment banks are trying to muscle in on this lucrative area, particularly in the family office sector. Traditional private banks are in serious danger of losing out.

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Mutual funds: strong growth expected in Europe - especially Germany

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Home Services: next stop France

Home Services has been offering home insurance in the UK since 1994 through various partners. Moving into France in alliance with major shareholder Vivendi should allow Home Services to take a slice of a E37 million market, without much short term opposition. In the medium term, however, the opportunity may be too attractive for other major European utilities to ignore.

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European finance: customers want to switch provider, but it's too hard

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Egg: beating the competition

Egg, majority-owned by Prudential, is the UK's leading Internet-only bank by a huge margin. Its key challenges now are to turn France's Zebank into a success, and to cross-sell more premium products, reducing its reliance on credit cards. Neither of these objectives looks impossible - and if Egg achieves them, it will truly have cracked it.

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Customer switching: UK has lowest rate for FSIs

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Egg: let's go to work

Egg acquired 362,000 net new customers in the first half of 2002, and turned last year's GBP63.4 million loss into a pretax profit of GBP1.2 million. It's also improved its cross-selling efforts, signing up its credit card consumers to higher-margin products. As long as it can continue this trend in the UK and elsewhere, Egg looks set to increase its presence still further.

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BNP Paribas: taking the Credit

This latest acquisition brings new movement into the French banking sector, following speculation that Credit Agricole, previously largest shareholder of Credit Lyonnais with 10.5%, would acquire the government's stake. BNP's unusually high offer safely secured the stake and also suggests it could be looking for a full takeover in the long term.

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BNP: crusade against Agricole

Credit Agricole's acquisition of Credit Lyonnais would create a major rival to BNP Paribas in many of its key markets. BNP's attempts to quash the E19.5 billion acquisition deal appears likely to fail due to a lack of support from other banks.

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BNP: SocGen not a target

A merger of BNP and SocGen would create a significant player, countering the potential domination of the French retail banking market by the proposed Credit Agricole/Lyonnais union. However, BNP's previous attempts to create a national banking champion have come back to haunt it, scuppering any likelihood of a merger with SocGen.<BR />

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