LONDON (Reuters) – UniCredit’s CEO Andrea Orcel said on Wednesday he was “less optimistic” about the prospects for sizeable European banking consolidation than a few months ago because bank bosses were growing increasingly nervous about the time needed to execute deals.
Orcel thrust his bank into two M&A situations last year by acquiring up to 30% in Germany’s Commerzbank and bidding for Italian peer Banco BPM, heightening expectations for a wave of dealmaking across the region.
The dealmaker-turned-CEO told an event in London that it would be at least a year before he had turned his initial 9% stake – announced in September last year – in Commerzbank into a 30% holding, and nine months before UniCredit had decided whether to proceed with its bid for BPM.
“This is a long time, this is a lot of uncertainty,” he told the Morgan Stanley European Financials Conference in London.
Unless European authorities made strong signals about progress on a European banking union, cross-border M&A was unlikely and even large domestic consolidation, he added. “I am less positive than I was at the end of last year, on people doing things in size,” he said.
UniCredit received approval from the European Central Bank last week to buy up to 30% in Commerzbank, and that it would likely wait until 2026 before taking a decision on pursuing a full takeover.
Orcel said on Wednesday the lender must now wait for approvals from German anti-trust authorities, which could take months, and to engage with a new German government, before deciding whether to convert derivatives positions it holds into shares.
“It is difficult to see how we can be on the other side of things before September or October,” he said.
Orcel also told the event that UniCredit could increase its investment into its German business because the fiscal spending announced in the country Germany’s prospects.
(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes; Editing by Iain Withers and Sinead Cruise)
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