graduated summa cum laude with an undergraduate thesis on hostile takeovers. He went on to attend the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France. Career Merrill Lynch Upon his graduation, Orcel was hired by American investment bank Goldman Sachs in 1988, aged 25, to work in their fixed income business in London. A year later he left the firm to work as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group from 1989 to 1992 in their strategy consulting practice in Paris, France. In 1992, he was asked to join Merrill Lynch & Co. in their Financial Institutions Group (FIG) in London. Orcel orchestrated the $25 billion (€21.2 billion) merger of Italian banking groups, Credito Italiano and UniCredito to form banking conglomerate UniCredit in 1998. UniCredito had originally planned to go public but the stock market valuation proposed by bankers at a rival investment bank made UniCredito "unhappy". Orcel called the bank and offered to explore the possibility of a merger with a comparable company as the initial deal was going through; he brought them to Merrill Lynch a week later. The merger made UniCredit the largest bank in Italy. The following year he was the advisor on the $13 billion (€11 billion) merger of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya and Argentaria to create BBVA. BBVA became the second largest bank in Spain after the merger. Orcel served as the head of the Global FIG team from 2003 to 2007, succeeding Joseph Willit. In 2004, Orcel initiated Spanish bank Santander's acquisition of British bank Abbey National, expanding the bank's operations into the United Kingdom in a deal valued at $15.6 billion (£13.8 billion). He was tapped by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) in 2007 to advise on a $55 billion (£49 billion) acquisition of ABN Amro. The deal was orchestrated by Orcel after he brought in Fortis and Santander to execute a three-way consortium bid for ABN Amro. At the time, the bid set a record for the largest merger or acquisition in financial services history. For the acquisition, Merrill Lynch received $12 million (£7.5 million) in advisory fees. Months later, the oncoming financial crisis surfaced, quickly reducing the capital buffers of banks all over the world, causing major damage to RBS and forcing the UK Government to seize control of it. The Institutional Investor labeled Orcel "one of the most controversial bankers of the financial crisis". In November 2008, Orcel's team at Merrill