"I always wanted to be a banker"
How did the merger in 1990 of ABN and Amro come about?
Allow me to step back a little further in the history to explain.
ABN, formerly the Netherlands Trading Society (NTS), was established by King William I, the merchant king, in 1824. He also established the Belgian Generale Bank and De Nederlandsche Bank, which is now our central bank. He was a real entrepreneur. He asked the Netherlands Trading Society to set up in Holland, and also what is now in Indonesia, then part of the Dutch Empire. The NTS started in 1824 by opening in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague but that was all they had in Holland. The rest of the growth came from the Far East. We opened in what is now Jakarta in 1825, and in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore and Malaysia all about a century or more ago. In that sense we can be compared with Hongkong Bank: weíre a very old Asian bank. The business was financing local businesses in Holland and in these Asian countries, plus the trade between the two.