Megabank joins BNP Paribas, Deutsche, UBS and others in Netherlands push. The mini-scramble for wealth-management wallet share in the Netherlands continued this week with Dresdner Bank's acquisitions of two firms: Maastricht-based Franke & Partners Vermogensbeheer and Blaricum-based De Vries & Co.

Together the firms manage about $350 million.

Frankfurt-based Dresdner is keeping the finer points of the deals to itself.

Lowlands

Dresdner has owned another Dutch private-client asset manager, Veer Palthe Voûte, since 1999. The Gouda-based firm manages about $3.6 billion for nearly 2,500 clients.

Over the summer Paris-based BNP Paribas agreed to buy a 35% stake in the corporate parent of Amsterdam-based Bank Insinger de Beaufort and combine the businesses of its Dutch private-banking subsidiary Nachenius Tjeenk to create an Anglo-Dutch wealth manager with about $16 billion in assets under management.

In another recent move Dutch-Belgian banking and insurance firm Fortis agreed to sell the Dutch commercial- and private-banking parts of ABN Amro to Deutsche Bank.

This past spring Zurich-based UBS bought Amsterdam-based wealth-management boutique VermogensGroep.

Numbers

And it isn't just European players who are eager to serve the Netherlands' wealthy, who, together with their fellow lowlanders in Belgium, are frugal, loyal and unusually keen on in-country investing, according to a 2006 report by the London-based market-research firm Datamonitor. New York-based Merrill Lynch has added six veteran advisors to its Amsterdam office in the past few months.

Together the Netherlands and Belgium had more than three and a half million high-net-worth individuals with $934 billion in investable assets in 2006, says Datamonitor. Dresdner bought Belgian wealth managers Van Moer Santerre and Damien Courtens in 2007.

Late last month Frankfurt-based Commerzbank agreed to pay Allianz, the Munich-based insurance giant, $14.4 billion for Dresdner. The U.K. banking group Lloyds TSB had expressed interest in acquiring Dresdner, but dropped out of the running in July 2008.

Allianz acquired Dresdner in 2001. -FWR

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