Outside of Norway in the Nordic region mergers and other forms of consolidation are widespread.
Merita, perhaps Finland's pre-eminent bank, joined forces with NordBanken, one of Sweden's largest commercial banks, in October 1997. Merita itself was formed by a merger between Kansallis-Osake-Pankki and Unitas. The merger is the only full cross-border union between (theoretical) equals. It involves two holding companies, Merita and Nordbanken Holding, listed on the Helsinki and Stockholm exchanges respectively; the two jointly own MeritaNordbanken, registered in Finland but majority owned (60%) by Nordbanken. The overall HQ is in Stockholm and the president and CEO, Hans Dalborg, is from the Nordbanken side.
"The driving force is that we wanted to grow," says Bjorn Westberg, senior vice-president, in Stockholm. "There wasn't much chance for us to grow in Sweden, and Merita was already so big. The target was to be a low-cost producer through economies of scale, and we couldn't get a client base of 6.5 million in Sweden without merging with one of our Swedish competitors, which at that time was never an issue."
Not strictly a merger, but a consolidation all the same, Leonia is a newly formed holding company in Finland that owns 100% of two other institutions, Leonia Bank and Leonia Corporate Bank.