The stock price of ABN AMRO rose the last days on behalf of rumors that the Bank of America would be interested to buy the Dutch bank. The stock price of ABN is lacking behind in comparison with other European banks and is therefore an interesting ‘cheap’ candidate for other big banks (with a high valuation). Traders are speculating that The Bank of America would be interested in buying ABN.
ABN has a market cap of $53 billion at this moment (Bank of America -$235 billion-).
But does it make any sense? If the Bank of America buys ABN, than they just have a bigger bank, they’ll continuing doing the same things, so little innovation can be expected here.
Everybody knows that in the near future more and more payments will go thru the Internet. Online sales keep rising on an astonishing rate! And of course the money ends up in people’s bank accounts, but the transfer rates are going to the PayPal’s of the future. And even the banks cash cow (stock exchanges) will face large competition in the near future (the rumor goes that the founders of Skype are determined to turn around the financial sector -just as they did with the music industry (Kazaa) and the telecom sector (Skype)). I’m wandering if banks are aware of all this (probably not, the sector is sleeping for years and years already). At least an acquisition of ABN by another bank doesn’t make much sense in this light.
I believe that banks need to innovate if they want keep their position.
Why would Vodafone be interested in ABN? Ask yourself these questions: How do you pay for a Mars-bar, or your coffee at Star Bucks, your new fake la fraise tees from the market, the parking lot, etc. ? Well, in most cases you’d probably answer or a. cash or b. credit card. But what to think of C. Your Mobile phone!
A lot of services can be paid for through your mobile phone bill. If I want to vote (by SMS) for my favorite Holland’s Next Top Model, I’ll receive an SMS with a ‘Thank you for voting’ message in it for which my phone bill will be credited an extra 90 cents (or more). Of this 90 cents almost half goes to the telecom provider! The ‘transaction’ costs of mobile payments are immensely high. The main reason the Telcos will give you is that they take on the financial risk of not paying customers. And to be honest, they are right. The Telco doesn’t know if you’re able (or willing) to pay your bill and they have problems with collecting the money.
So, it would make sense if your telephone bill is incorporated into your bank account. The costs of mobile payment would decrease to virtually zero and before you know it you’re paying everywhere with your Nokia F2.0. One way this could be done is if a Bank starts his own Telco (or vica versa), another way is if a Bank and a Telco merger (or one acquires the other).
Vodafone should consider an aqcuisition of the ABN (or any other banks that they can afford with a worldwide network). There are a lot of good reasons for both parties to join forces (I might dig deeper into this in a future post).
The combination of a bank and a telco (both already having millions of customers) is a very powerfull one, and mind my words…. it is the future.
(The coffee incident! unfortunately not documented) and after the conference they raised a small amount (word goes about a million) from Angel investors in the Netherlands and now about 2 months later, they suck 5 million out of the market from the BIG guys in the states.
In the blogpost about 
Welcome Zecco,
So, everybody has a MP3 player, right?*
