Industrial and Corporate Change, Volume 8, Number 1, pp. 137-165
© 1999 Oxford University Press
The Norwegian banks in the Nordic consortia: a case of international strategic alliances in banking
a The LEK Partnership, London, UK
b Department of Management, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6370, USA. E-mail: tschoegl@mit.alum.edu
Abstract
Despite the scholarly interest in joint ventures and strategic alliances, the consortium bank movement represents and under-researched phase in postwar banking history. From 1964 to the early 1980s, many of the largest banks in the world, including the Nordic banks, entered into international strategic alliances. Almost all of these alliances are now defunct and thus we are looking at the growth and demise of an organizational form. We follow the Norwegian banks in the Nordic consortia and find that domestic rivals do not cooperate but international rivals do. Legal prohibitions in the Nordic countries on entry by foreign banks underpinned the cooperation. The cooperation broke down when, as a result of deregulation, the Nordic banks could establish operations in each other's domestic markets and when domestic mergers disrupted existing international alliances.