Crédit Agricole shuffles off its equities overlap

As BNP Paribas and Exane were preparing to unveil their joint venture plans, Crédit Agricole was deciding what to do with the equities businesses it had picked up along with Crédit Lyonnais last year. Crédit Agricole already had a strong brokerage business in the form of CAI Cheuvreux, which has the highest-ranked (13) pan-European research of any French broker, according to the July 2003 Thomson Extel Focus France Survey. Merging Chevreux with Crédit Lyonnais' weaker European brokerage business would have made little sense, as the overlap would have been too great. One French analyst says: "A good merger is one in which one plus one is more than two; Chevreux plus Crédit Lyonnais would probably be worth less than one."