The proposed merger reported last month between Kereskedelmi es Hitelbank (a subsidiary of Belgium’s KBC Bank) and Magyar Bank (owned by the Dutch group ABN Amro) was confirmed yesterday. The merger will create the second largest bank group in Hungary, with a market share of approximately 15% and assets of 3.9bn.
Kбroly Martinkу, CEO and Chairman of Magyar Factor, believes that the merger is unlikely to have an immediate impact on either Magyar Factor (joint owned by ABN and the Austrian company, Intermarket) or the factoring activity of K & H (the Hungarian bank owned by KBC). The task of integrating the factoring subsidiaries of KBC and ABN is of secondary importance at present to combining the banks themselves. Further to this the legal processes involved in the merger will not be completed until the middle of 2001, so even the banks themselves will continue to function separately until this has happened.
