We study a sample of the world’s largest financial conglomerates from 15 countries and we track their largest divestitures over the period 2005–2016. We develop a novel market-based metric to analyse the impact of divestitures on financial conglomerate excess value, and our findings point to divestitures having a significant impact on financial conglomerate valuation, contributing to a reduced conglomerate discount. Our results are driven by sales of financial service assets. Selling assets unrelated to the financial sector has no significant effect on conglomerate excess value. These results are robust with the inclusion of multiple control variables and alternative econometric model specifications. Altogether these results cast doubts on the existence of large benefits for financial conglomerates from combining financial service activities. This study has implications both for financial conglomerate boards who might direct their strategies to downsize their firms, and for regulators who address issues related to financial stability.

Diversified and focused business models may affect foreign bank efficiency differently. We investigate whether there is an optimal business model along three business dimensions—assets, funding and income—and which business model is optimal for foreign banks in a financial center. We apply recently developed non-parametric methods with bootstrap to estimate group efficiency, to test for differences across groups and finally to analyze the link between bank efficiency and diversification measures. Using Luxembourg bank data that include the financial crisis, we find that there is no unique business model. The most efficient business model appears to be a focused asset, funding and income strategy. Banks’ organizational forms play a role; branches may be preferable to subsidiaries prior to the financial crisis, whereas bank subsidiaries perform better than branches during the financial crisis. However, branches diversified in assets, funding and income exploit efficiency advantages during the financial crisis.