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The European banking industry has experienced profound changes in regulation, technology and market structure over the last two decades. Since the late 1990s, a strong wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and market consolidation processes occurred, prompted mainly by external market influences. This book focuses on M&A from both theoretical and practical views, and its key aim is to determine whether M&A transactions in the European banking sector can be justified through the creation of value for bank shareholders. For this analysis, we conducted an event study examining the value implications of 59 M&A transactions of listed European banks carried out between 1998 and 2007. Our expectation that large value creation would exist for the target shareholders was validated by the results. However, the contrary occurred for the bidding banks, where value destruction was discovered. Moreover, we present results for several sub-samples analysing differences in terms of value creation between domestic and cross-border deals, cash and equity-financed deals and transactions of different sizes. Finally, we discuss the main M&A drivers expected in forthcoming years.

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