It takes more than a transnational merger of stock exchanges to get the phlegmatic Finns excited – and they are not, in the short-term at least, particularly worked up about the merger of Scandinavia’s two largest exchanges, Sweden’s OM and Finland’s HEX respectively, announced last month.
On 20 May, the respective owners of the main exchanges in Stockholm and Helsinki announced the deal, effectively a takeover by the former, worth some e231m ($270m) and simultaneously invited the owners of the Norwegian and Danish exchanges to join them. OM already works in alliance with the Oslo, Copenhagen and Reykjavik exchanges, while HEX owns the main Estonian and Latvian exchanges.
