Italy’s biggest banking group Intesa Sanpaolo today announced a \u20ac30.6 billion unsolicited cash-and-share bid to buy rival lender Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), kicking off a fresh consolidation drive.<\/p>\n
Having secured a fifth of the Italian banking market with the acquisition of mid-sized UBI back in 2020, Intesa kept out of a mergers and acquisitions burst sweeping the industry last year, saying antitrust limits prevented any further domestic expansion.<\/p>\n
To address competition issues, Intesa said it had struck a deal with insurer Unipol, the main investor in BPER Banca, to sell a banking business comprising 635 MPS branches and the MPS brand, if its bid was successful.<\/p>\n
Intesa and Unipol teamed up in a similar manner in the UBI deal.<\/p>\n
Intesa said the combined entity would become the euro zone’s second-biggest banking group by market value after Spain’s Santander, with a capitalisation of \u20ac126 billion and a net income goal of \u20ac16 billion in 2029, up from last year’s combined profits of \u20ac13.6 billion.<\/p>\n
MPS, which the state bailed out in 2017 and reprivatised in 2023-2024, emerged as a focal point for further Italian banking consolidation after buying Mediobanca last year.<\/p>\n
That deal made it the largest investor in insurer Generali, a coveted asset in Italian finance.<\/p>\n
Intesa, whose business model is focused on wealth management and insurance, had attempted to buy Generali in 2017, but dropped the plan and grew its insurance business internally.<\/p>\n
Italy’s second-biggest bank UniCredit last year built a large stake in Generali.<\/p>\n
Intesa said in a statement its offer entailed a premium of 12.5% compared to the closing share price of MPS on Friday, for an overall outlay of \u20ac30.6 billion versus the MPS market value of \u20ac27.4 billion.<\/p>\n
Amid mounting expectations of an Intesa move, Banco BPM yesterday said its board had unanimously approved seeking to open talks with MPS over a potential combination between the two lenders that would be a merger of equals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Italy’s biggest banking group Intesa Sanpaolo today announced a \u20ac30.6 billion unsolicited cash-and-share bid to buy rival lender…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489520,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":["post-489519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}