Merrill Lynch’s singleness of purpose played a vital part in the Royal Bank of Scotland-led consortium’s takeover of ABN AMRO. And nowhere more so than in the Fortis rights issue, the biggest ever in dollar terms, which tipped the scales against all predictions. Edward Russell-Walling reports.
Although biology is a well-known science, there is a lesser-known science with the a deceptively similar name: buyology. I created this science for banks to deal with the new world of ‘freakonomics’, where everyone is struggling to understand the methods to get customers buying and, in its purest form, buyology is defined as: the science of understanding business relationships.