On the night of 28 November, 2005, Yvan de Cock, chief executive of Fortis in Turkey, received some extra evidence that his company had made the right decision in 2004 in spending €1bn to acquire Disbank. That was the night the bank changed its name and logo at its 186 branches around the country, in a logistically tricky operation that, he recalls, went like clockwork. Customers who had banked with Disbank one day were customers of Fortis the next.
“It showed that this is a country where it is possible to get things done,” Mr de Cock says, at Fortis Turkey’s headquarters on the edge of Istanbul’s financial district. Disbank, which began as a foreign trade bank but was a growing retail bank when the Benelux financial powerhouse bought it, “was a quite well-established bank, but within 45 days of the switch, Fortis was one of the three most remembered brand names in Turkey,” he says.
