Barclays on Friday abandoned its bid for Dutch lender ABN Amro, paving the way for a consortium led by Royal Bank of Scotland to clinch the world’s largest banking deal.

What began as an agreement between ABN Amro and Barclays to merge the two banks’ operations escalated into a Europe-wide bid battle, with the RBS consortium, which also includes Santander of Spain and Fortis, the Belgo-Dutch financial services group, making a higher - largely cash - offer.

Although Barclays, which had originally made a €66bn all-share offer, sweetened its approach with cash, its bid still lagged behind the RBS-led proposal, which values the Dutch bank at €71bn.

With stock making up a portion of both offers, much depended on share price movements. FT.com’s interactive graphic charts the share prices of the five banks involved in the struggle for the Netherlands’ biggest bank by assets and tracks changes in the value of the competing offers.