Текст 2

IT'S GOT TO FIT SOMEHOW LONDON AND NEW YORK

A big Swiss bank plans to buy a top insurer. Does the future of banking belong to the financial conglomerate?

Martin Taylor, the famously clever boss of Barclays, Britain's second-biggest bank, has a talent for char­ming the stockmarket. His latest stroke of genius? Barclays has just announced plans to return more capital to its shareholders, who are delighted by the news. Yet in one respect, Mr Taylor's bank seems a less seductive investment: Barclays owns a sprawling collection of businesses. In Britain, the bank sells mortgages and personal loans. To Americans, the firm is better known as a fund manager. To the world's biggest companies, Barclays is an investment bank, helping to underwrite their shares and bonds. Far from running the sort of sharply focused firm that tends to please share-holders these days, Mr Taylor's bank looks suspiciously like a doddery old conglomerate.

Barclays is a fine company. Almost weekly, exotic new combinations of banks, fund managers and insu­rance companies are cooked up and served to the world's investors. In America, Wall Street's well-hailed investment banks are merging with mass-market retail brokers. In Europe, commercial banks have bought securities firms and insurance companies. On August 11^th, Credit Suisse, Switzerland's biggest bank, said it was merging with Winterthur, the country's second-largest insurer. Many of these nascent conglomerates claim to be harbingers of a new age. They may yet prove to be relics of the past.

Financial mergers are hardly novel. Since 1987 nearly $1.4 trillion-worth of mergers have swept through the industry. Yet much of this is uncontroversial stuff-banks have bought other banks, closed branches and got rid of workers. The logic of combining different sorts of financial firm, however, has little to do with cost-cutting. Some companies claim that, together, their businesses can chum out more profits than they do apart. Others say they have no choice.

The most widely cited for this is the changing behaviour of customers. Savers are deserting banks for the rewarding places to park their money, such as in mutual funds (unit trusts, in Britain) and insurance policies. Borrowers are also shunning banks, turning instead to the capital markets to raise cash more cheaply. If they want to hold on to this business, bankers argue, they must follow their customers.

The supposed advantage of a financial conglomerate is the ability to meet all of its customers' needs from personal loans to put options, in one financial super­market. ING, for example, is an eclectic blend of the Netherlands' biggest insurer, a postal bank, a swash­buckling commercial bank and Barings, an investment bank. In America, where commercial bankers still face restrictions when it comes to selling shares and insurance, Sanford Weill, the boss of Travelers Group, has moulded Smith Barney, a brokerage, and Travelers, an insurer, into a huge stocks-funds-and-insurance house.

For some bankers, diversification has become an end as much as a means. As a stand-alone business, banking hardly sets the pulse racing. Since 1990, according to IBCA, a credit-rating agency, the average return on equity earned by the world's 500 biggest commercial banks has climbed above 10% only once, in 1993. That makes investment banking look tempting. Yet competition among investment banks has eroded profits here too, partly because commercial banks are piling into the industry. In 1981, according to the Securities Industry Association, a trade body in America, large investment banks earned an average 50% return on their equity. Now, most do well to earn a third of that.

This, in turn, has supplied ample motive for investment banks to diversify out of their own business. In February, Morgan Stanley, an American investment bank, announced its merger with Dean Witter, Discover, amutual-fund and credit-card group. Together with last year's purchase of Van Kampen, a mutual-fund outfit, Morgan Stanley has swiftly turned itself into America's second-biggest fund manager.