Best bank
Fortis
Best debt house
KBC
Best equity house
Petercam
Best M&A house
Banque Degroof
The leading banks in Belgium have long since fallen prey to acquisitive Dutch-based financial groups. ING acquired Banque Bruxelles Lambert and Fortis acquired Generale Bank in 1998. At the time of these deals Generale was Belgium’s largest bank and Fortis later added the country’s fifth largest when it bought ASLK-CGER Bank. It has integrated these operations around Fortis Bank, providing retail banking, corporate banking, private banking and investment banking in Belgium.
An indication of how deeply entrenched Fortis Bank is with Belgium companies came when the EIB recently chose it as a partner to disburse a e100 million credit line to small and medium-size enterprises in Belgium. The credit is to support capital projects and the EIB is entrusting Fortis Bank with distributing it among qualifying companies. The bank is a strong provider of trade finance, project finance and commodity finance to these Benelux corporate customers.
It is not clear how dedicated Fortis Bank will be to these business in future, however. Fortis has a new chief executive officer, Anton Van Rossum, who is known to be taking an uncompromising and unemotional analysis of Fortis’s business portfolio. He has no particular attachments to any business line and insiders suggest that one likely conclusion is that Fortis Bank should devote less capital to banking for small and medium-size enterprises in Belgium. Fortis may look for further cost savings from more closely integrating Generale Bank into the rest of the group.
The largest remaining purely Belgian bank is KBC, formed from the merger of Kredietbank, Cera, a mutual bank and ABB, the insurance company. Like many European banks worried by the constraints of a small home market, KBC has been making acquisitions in central and eastern Europe, notably in the Czech Republic. KBC is controlled by the Alamnij holding company of Flemish family interests. In recent months it has arranged syndicated loans for several large Belgian companies, including Sabena, Brussels International Airport, Kinepolis Group and Interbrew. Largely on the strength of this it wins our award for best debt house.
In the equity markets, Fortis has been a big issuer, retaining UBS Warburg to distribute its shares and Merrill Lynch has acted as global coordinator for Interbrew. But Petercam remains the pre-eminent specialist research house and broker in Belgian equities.
Petercam has long been the leading equity trader on the Brussels bourse and maintains institutional equity sales coverage in Europe and New York for domestic and foreign investors in Belgian shares from the UK, US, Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy and Scandinavia. It has been expanding recently in equity derivatives and in the technology and biotech sectors and now boast a 10% share of trading on Nasdaq Europe.
While larger investment banking groups play lead roles in the handful of larger M&A assignments in Belgium – such as ING Barings acting for Groupe Bruxelles Lambert in its deal with Electrafina – here too a smaller domestic group takes the plaudits.
Banque Degroof pursues a niche strategy of asset management and investment banking for private and public companies. In the past 12 months it has completed dozens of smaller investment banking assignments and some larger ones. It acted with Jones Lang Lasalle as exclusive adviser to AXA/Royal Belge on the disposal of Primaedis, the property portfolio management company.
It advised the technology company Ascii on its sale to FI System of France and Imprimerie Hecht/Affiche Européenne on its sale to Société Générale European Private Equity Partners.
