"I always wanted to be a banker"
Conservative but dynamic
A marriage of necessity
ABN Amro is an unusual institution. No other bank is successful in such a wide range of businesses: from auto leases in Brazil, to retail banking in the US, and Eurobond lead-management. It's the biggest foreign bank in both the US and Japan. There's hardly a banking field it's not expanding in.
And all this has happened in a mere seven years - since the bank was formed by a merger of two Dutch banks in 1990. Yet ABN Amro has made no headline-grabbing mergers. Its investment banking network has been put together from a patchwork formed of a dozen small acquisitions. Most of these units retain their original names.
The bank also has a unique culture. Its board meets twice a week for three hours at a time and approves every major loan and senior appointment....
