in the winter of 1996, canada's third largest financial institution, the bank of montreal, launched a now infamous advertising campaign in which it asked the question: can a bank change? while the resulting ads naturally responded in the affirmative, many other large financial institutions were asking themselves the same question. the dramatic acceleration since the mid-to-late 1980's of the rate at which banks are establishing branches and/or investing in financial institutions outside of their home markets combined with the dismantling by governments around the world of many traditional regulatory restrictions is resulting in the re-making of the financial services industry in its entirety. central to this process has been a wave of mergers and alliances, many of which increasingly cut across the classical sectoral sub-divisions (commercial banking, securities, insurance etc.). the end result has been the gradual emergence of singular financial amorphisms capable of offering any s...
