When Gonzalo Gortázar first met José Ignacio Goirigolzarri, the two of them could never have imagined that, many years later, they would lead a new Spanish national banking champion together. Back then, around the turn of the millennium, Gortázar was an M&A banker at Morgan Stanley and Goirigolzarri was his client, leading BBVA’s purchases of banks across Latin America – most notably Bancomer, now Mexico’s biggest bank.
This was a time when European banks enjoyed better valuations than their emerging market peers. Negative interest rates were just an academic concept. Even deposit and mortgage-focused savings banks seemed healthy.
A quarter of a century later, things are very different, but after this year’s merger of CaixaBank and Bankia, the two are working together once again.
