Mr. Taylor: Fortis is a major international group based in the Benelux which is a leader in the fields of banking, insurance and investment. It is one of the top 15 financial institutions in Europe with a market capitalisation of EUR40 billion. Fortis was formed in 1990 from the merger of Belgium's largest insurer, AG1824 (now Fortis AG) and two Dutch bancassurance groups, AMEV and VSB. With origins going back to 1720 in the Netherlands and 1822 in Belgium, these companies recognised that, come the European playing field of the 21st century, they would not necessarily be strong enough or large enough to survive on their own. They clearly saw synergies between the businesses and said, why don't we get together and form an organisation which can be grown both organically and through targeted acquisitions - so that the Group would become a major force in the 21st century, which would not only survive but also prosper. During the 1990's, Fortis was actively pursuing this growth strategy with various important acquisitions on both the banking and insurance sides. Back in 1990 there were around 17,000 employees; today the Group employs over 62,000 worldwide. Whilst most of the acquired companies retained their own brand names, at least initially, there has been substantial and highly successful integration of same sector businesses over the last two years. On the banking side, for example, by 1998 Fortis owned six European banks which have been merged to form Fortis Bank in March 1999. Two of these, Generale Bank - one of Belgium's leading banking groups - and Mees Pierson -a top Dutch investment bank were well known in the UK with long established operations in the City of London. Today the new Fortis Bank is building on these foundations with a rapidly expanding network of business centres being opened across Europe. In the UK, around 10 of these business centres, or regional offices have been established in key locations including Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham and Reading, where the Bank's principal focus is middle market companies and selected larger corporates for whom it provides tailored solutions which are delivered locally by dedicated teams of top professional bankers. Fortis provides a very wide range of products and services - including cross border finance, acquisition finance, cash management, FOREX and treasury. So where does Fortis Commercial Finance fit in? Well, most of the banks acquired by the Group were involved in factoring/invoice finance across different countries and were trading in their own right. We had something like three factoring companies in Belgium, two or three in Holland, one in Germany, two in France and two activities in the UK. So it made sense as Fortis started to harmonise the names and integrate operations to say, we don't want two invoice finance operations, or three, in each country, we want one in each country. The big decision the Group took was to recognise that invoice finance as an activity is quite specialist, so rather than having the invoice finance activities totally absorbed into the branch bank-type network, as a lot of the UK banks are now doing, they said, it's part of Fortis Bank but it's a specialist part. So they took the route of saying, first of all, we'll merge all these in the various countries and then we'll set up a holdings group, which is Dutch based - Fortis Commercial Finance Holdings - and then have that as a specialist business line with the different activities in the countries that we operate in. In the UK we merged what was called FMN Financial together with a subsidiary of Fortis Bank UK, which was Fortis Bank Commercial Finance - basically they were both doing the same thing but had come from different owners, if you can call it that, within the past. How core are we to the Fortis Bank? Well, it's seen as one of the core activities of the Bank. Where we tend to differ, I would say, from the UK factoring companies, which are mainly the UK banks' subsidiaries or departments, and they do dominate the sector - it is our European outlook. Fortis Commercial Finance has offices in UK, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. A new office is opening in Italy, we're looking at Spain and also Poland to open; so we've got a network at the moment of five countries but then expanding it to become an international player; and that I think is quite a big difference.
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