BBVA, a Spanish multinational financial services company, offered to merge with Sabadell, a Spanish banking group, in a €12bn deal. The new entity would create one of Europe’s largest and most robust financial entities, boasting over one trillion euros in assets and serving more than 100m clients worldwide, with the ambition of becoming the largest bank by market capitalization of the Eurozone. On May 9th, BBVA launched a €12.23bn hostile takeover bid for Sabadell.