RBS boss determined to top banking 'premier league'
Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive Fred Goodwin spoke of his ambition to catapult the business “to the top of the premier league” this week if his attempts to land Dutch bank ABN Amro are successful.
But then Goodwin – who is leading a banking consortium hoping to win ABN from the grasp of Barclays with a potential £48.1bn (€70.8bn) offer – has made a habit of transformational deals during his nine-year tenure at the helm of RBS.
Since joining the business in 1998, Goodwin has propelled the group into the ranks of the world’s top ten global banks by market capitalisation.
First he masterminded a £21bn (€31bn) takeover of NatWest in March 2000 – the biggest deal in UK banking history.
He followed this up in 2004 with the $10.5bn (€7.8bn) acquisition of US bank Charter One, which doubled the size of RBS’s US business Citizens, elevating a local retail bank to one of the 10 largest commercial banks in the US.
