Dutch lessor ABN Amro Lease plans to expand in the UK and Germany and will consider buying a leasing business if a suitable unit becomes available.
Gerrit Zalm, chief executive of the company’s parent bank ABN Amro, said the company wants to expand its UK leasing business at a recent commemoration of over 150 years of ABN Amro doing business in the UK.
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Paul Meijer, senior sales manager for ABN Amro Lease, who is responsible for driving the bank’s UK leasing operation, said the company was actually looking to expand in several European markets.
Talking to Leasing Life, Meijer said the Dutch bank’s subsidiary was not only looking to the UK and Germany, but also France and Belgium. The company will target the UK and Germany first, before France, and finally Belgium, which Meijer described as a "difficult" market to penetrate.
"Those countries are very important trading nations [for the Netherlands]," he said. "And there are a lot of companies whose parents have subsidiaries over there and vice versa."
Meijer said ABN Amro Lease, which operates from offices in Utrecht and occasionally uses the parent company’s London headquarters for UK business, needs a "permanent establishment" in the UK.
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By GlobalDataABN Amro does offering leasing in Germany, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, but it wants to establish a physical presence.
Meijer said: "We are a foreign leasing company and everything we do is cross-border. So we are just here to visit clients and have meetings, because the business is all done in the Netherlands."
Meijer said that while ABN Amro Lease is hoping to grow organically in the UK, the company would not be averse to buying another leasing business if one were to become available.
Referring to suggestions within the industry that banks are looking to dispose of their leasing operations, he said there are opportunities "now and then" and "if there is something on our desk then we are willing to look into it".
He added the company will investigate any potential deal to "see if it is right" for ABN Amro Lease.
Meijer said he was aware of several banks looking to sell, but would not reveal their names.
"There are a lot of opportunities in the market, not only here but all over the place, as long as you do the things you are good at, and can deliver, that’s the most important thing."
ABN Amro is "doing well", Meijer said, having improved its liquidity and it is looking to buy itself back from the Dutch Government which bailed out the bank in 2008.
Meijer said the leasing business was able to expand in the UK, Germany and other markets "quite easily" while "a lot of other banks and leasing companies have problems gathering sufficient funding for the business."
"Other banks have a lot of things to look after," he said, "and have a lot of other problems that we don’t have.
"They had to make some strategic closures, which means if they enter into one market, they have to leave another."
