Danske CEO: ‘Email me’ as bank breaks with old norms

Bloomberg

The new chief executive officer of Danske Bank A/S says he wants anyone with good ideas about how to run his firm to contact him.
About 1 1/2 years after Danske was slammed by its financial regulator for having a culture that discouraged staff from speaking up, the bank is embracing transparency. Chris Vogelzang, a former ABN Amro banker who became Danske’s CEO last month, says he’d like to hear directly from investors and employees.
“We’re trying to be as transparent as possible,” Vogelzang said in an interview. “I want everybody in the bank to be able to speak up if they believe things can improve.” He says he’s handed his contact details to staff and others across Scandinavia, “so that people can actually send me emails on what they think should happen.”
A retail banker who helped guide ABN Amro back to health after it was rescued by the Dutch state, Vogelzang has been brought in to help Denmark’s biggest bank deal with the fallout of a $230 billion money-laundering debacle that erupted last year. The affair ended the career of the man who used to be Danske’s CEO, Thomas Borgen. He’s now one of several former executives to have had preliminary criminal charges brought against them.
Denmark’s Financial Supervisory Authority said last year that the “mean and lean” culture Danske used to have was probably part of the reason it slipped into such a devastating scandal.
Under the bank’s former top management, the idea was “to solve issues at a lower level rather than bring them to people’s attention higher up,” the head of the Danish FSA, Jesper Berg, said in May 2018. “Obviously, that reveals a problem in terms of culture.”
The laundering scandal, which centres on Danske’s operations in Estonia between 2007 and 2015, has stunned investors, the wider public and Denmark’s political establishment. The bank’s stock is down about 60 percent — representing roughly $20 billion in lost market value — since the beginning of last year as shareholders brace for fines potentially in the billions of dollars.
Against the backdrop of the laundering affair, Danske is also struggling to adapt to markets dominated by negative interest rates. It issued a profit warning about a week before publishing quarterly results that included the prospect of higher capital requirements ahead.
Global regulators agreed to a one-year delay to the final phase of requirements that banks, hedge funds and other money managers hold more collateral for derivatives trades.