ABN Amro was never the fastest, most aggressive bank acquirer in the Midwest, but it has been persistent.
In Chicago, it consolidated the old LaSalle, Exchange National, Talman and other financial institutions and grew to become the second-largest player in town, behind various incarnations of current leader Bank One Corp. In April, the Amsterdam-based company plans to boost its market share significantly in Michigan through a scheduled acquisition of Michigan National Bank.
Gradually the company has grown from $10 billion in Midwest assets in the early 1990s to roughly $80 billion, including the Michigan National deal.
By next year, ABN Amro–better known in Chicago as LaSalle Bank–will be ready for another acquisition, if the right bank becomes available at a reasonable price, said Hill Hammock, LaSalle’s chief operating officer.
ABN Amro, which is considering its worldwide branding strategy and could announce name or branding changes this month, has said the three markets where it wants to rank among the top three players are the Netherlands, Brazil and the U.S. Midwest.
Currently, several Midwest banks are bigger, including Chicago-based Bank One; the soon-to-be-combined Firstar Corp. in Milwaukee and U.S. Bancorp in Minneapolis, and National City Corp. in Cleveland.
LaSalle views Ohio as one of the most attractive areas for growth–“It has the second-largest gross domestic product after Illinois,” Hammock said–but LaSalle is more interested in finding good acquisition opportunities than expanding into particular Midwestern states.
“Every state in the Midwest would be of interest to us,” he said, describing a Midwest that stretches from Iowa to the west, Missouri and Kentucky to the south, and Ohio to the east–an area where economic diversity has prevented the massive banking crises that sometimes erupt in places like Texas, California and New England.
LaSalle dipped its toe into Ohio last year with the opening of a commercial banking office in Cleveland, Hammock said. Cincinnati or Kansas City could be the next stop for the bank’s commercial area, whose loans grow by about 18 percent a year.
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Hammock said LaSalle expects no U.S. executive changes to come from the new look at branding, and he said it “remains to be seen” whether names will be changed. Some insiders have speculated the LaSalle name could be used more broadly–in Michigan, for example–or dropped altogether.
Bank notes: People close to Bank One in its old headquarters town of Columbus, Ohio, became concerned last week when they learned that Austin Adams, the Chicago-based bank’s new head of technology and operations, will be living in Chicago. His predecessor, Marvin Adams (no relation), was based in Columbus, where thousands of the company’s technology jobs are located. Bank One spokesman Thomas Kelly said the bank expects to keep a large base of technology employees in Columbus, and that the newly hired Adams will visit there regularly.
– Palatine-based First Bank & Trust Co. of Illinois named C. Richard Schuler to replace Michael Winter as president and a director. Winter recently became chairman and chief executive of Chicago-based Builders Bank. Schuler, 40, comes from the global high-yield real estate group at Merrill Lynch in New York, where he was a director. He worked in the late 1980s and early ’90s for Chicago’s old Continental Bank.