Fortis Bank was close to bankruptcy in 2008 after a combination of risky initiatives and the financial crisis depleted the company’s assets. One of these initiatives was the failed merger with a Dutch banking giant, ABN Amro, says Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, head of transversal portfolio management at BNP Paribas Fortis in Belgium.

Mr Nieto-Rodriguez was head of post-merger integration with the Fortis portfolio management team leading the consortium takeover of the bank in 2007. At the height of the merger, valued at US$1.8bn (€1.2bn), he oversaw a portfolio of 1,000 projects grouped into 130 different programmes, implemented by more than 6,000 people. “Everything in the merger was moving very fast. We had put together our best people to work in the integration, and honestly no one was expecting such an abrupt end,” he says.

A series of political and competition requirements imposed by regulators delayed the integration. This, combined with the global credit crisis, reduced Fortis’s liquidity and ultimately caused the merger to fail. In a matter of months, Fortis went from being the 20th-largest business in the world by revenue, with a market value of US$67.3bn (€45.7bn), to the verge of bankruptcy.

In 2008 the Dutch government was given ownership of ABN Amro and in 2009 Fortis was sold to a French bank, BNP Paribas, for US$19.8bn.  “The failure caught us all by surprise,” Mr Nieto-Rodriguez says. “I think that even those closest to the executive team did not know we were in such big trouble.”

Much of the problem with the Fortis-ABN Amro merger was the overall integration approach. “It was much too collaborative, instead of directive,” says Mr Nieto-Rodriguez. “We wanted to hear the opinion of everybody around the table so that we could get their buy-in, and build on best practices to create a state-of-the-art bank. However, looking back, I believe this approach made us lose critical time.”