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Bloomberg
Casper von Koskull, the chief executive officer of Nordea Bank Abp, says he has no intention of becoming a market leader when it comes to offering the fattest pay packages to entice talent.
The comments come as the biggest Nordic lender revealed that the amount of money it set aside to pay bonuses to its employees slumped 31 percent last year. While Nordea says the development was mainly driven by a weak performance at its capital markets unit, von Koskull says there’s no plan to shift gears on remuneration.
“We want to be competitive, but not market leading in our compensation,†von Koskull said in an interview on Wednesday, after the bank published fourth-quarter results that missed estimates.
“I think that’s what we have been and will be also going forward.’’
Nordea’s handling of pay should be viewed against the backdrop of a bank that’s taking drastic steps to cut costs. It’s outpacing many of its competitors when it comes to relying less on humans and more on automation. Nordea’s fourth-quarter results showed its headcount fell by about 1,400 people from a year earlier, when it announced plans to cut 6,000 jobs.
The Nordea CEO, who stunned much of the banking community with his 2017 prediction that the financial industry will probably have half as many workers in a decade, has set himself a target of cutting costs by 7 percent between 2017 and 2021.
But even after 2021, von Koskull says he wants to continue looking for places to reduce expenditure. Nordea’s profit in the fourth quarter fell 22 percent from a year earlier, which was a bigger drop than analysts had expected.