FORCED GROWTH STRATEGIES, BANCOLOMBIA

As it was explained by Alzira (2003): “The prospect of increasing profitability and market share by acquisitions continues to exercise a more seductive and immediate appeal to business leaders than a reliance on growth alone”1. Colombians industries are not the exception in this practice, indeed some of the most important corporations that hold a large quantity of the different markets, had been product of fusion or acquisitions as it was for example the case of Banco de Colombia with Conavi and Corfinsura; Fabricato and Tejicondor; the French group SEB with Imusa and the case of OI-peldar among others. Despite several of these unions were between corporations that started in Colombia and most of their employees were from the country, the new transition represented a real challenge for those who were leading the negotiations. In the case for the creation of Bancalombia as a consolidated financial entity, the terms, objectives, goals, services that will be achieve took a few years, it was in 2005 when the final approval by the Superintendencia Bancaria de Colombia was given; besides the legal diligences; the human resources arrangements for some position needed to be organize as well as the rest of places; team works, transference of knowledge and workplace values and practices and set and parameters to achieve goals were challenging.  By this process of acquisition the principal goal was to create a competitive bank, capable to compete in international markets and improved the services provided to clients. At the beginning a lot of meetings were required in order to find match along teams and pull off new corporative values that glues all as one, extra work to employees and managers was the daily task, and increasing and correctly implementing the new services was necessary in order to succeed in the objectives. After all this process Bancolombia is now one of the most important bank, it provides a large quantity of services to clients, and it is one of the few corporation running stocks in the New York stock market. This case is an example of how a well managed integration could be a success, it does not matter is the companies involves run business in the same or similar sector, or if they are from the same country, took for granted that the process is going to be easy, and that converge among employees, corporate values and practices are simple, it is the principal mistake to evade. 


Fuente imagenes:
http://www.foroin.com/2010/09/wwwbancolombiacomcreditos.html

http://www.classpublishing.com/egvgf.php?cgir=Grupo-Bancolombia


(1)  AlziraSalama, Wayne Holland, Gerald Vinten, (2003) "Challenges and opportunities in mergers and acquisitions: three international case studies –Deutsche Bank-Bankers Trust; British Petroleum-Amoco; Ford-Volvo", Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 27 Iss: 6, pp.313 –321