Nordea loses top sell-side bankers as cuts hit morale

Bloomberg

Nordea Bank AB has recently lost a number of its top sell-side bankers amid complaints that management’s focus on cutting 6,000 jobs is hurting morale in key parts of the business.
Examples of recent departures include the head of fixed income at Nordea Markets, Torben Pedersen. He’s in the process of starting his own hedge fund with Erik Bo Hansen, who used to be Nordea’s head of global trading at its fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit. The chief sales manager at Nordea Markets, Bjarne Hammeken, left to work for the Danish fund HP Fondsmaeglerselskab. Jan Erik Nilsen, who used to be the head of fixed-income sales at Nordea Markets in Oslo, left for a similar role at SEB AB, a competing Swedish bank.
Nordea’s own figures suggest that about 2,650 full-time employees have left the bank since the end of September last year. The job cuts were announced in October (of the 6,000 targeted, two-thirds are full-time employees). The bank currently has about 29,300 people working for it.
Erik Nordenskjold, who until this month was an investment strategist at Nordea in Stockholm, said highly experienced people are leaving because of the “stress” caused by the focus on retrenching.

‘Incredible Unease’
“It creates an incredible unease in the organisation, where the positioning of the managers prevails over the business skills,” he said. “The individuals that care about the clients get no room to be heard, therefore they quit.”
Nordea says it’s doing what it can to ensure employees aren’t unsettled by the prospect of mass job cuts. Christian Steffensen, head of communications at Nordea in Oslo, says the bank is “on target” with the reductions, though he declined to elaborate.
“Transformation is always demanding, and it’s affecting many people in the organisation,” he said. “We’re eager to make sure we look after those people affected and have, among other initiatives, created a unit, Job Mobility, that will support employees in identifying opportunities, both outside and inside Nordea.”
CEO Casper von Koskull has said the goal is to become a more efficient bank that relies less on humans and more on automation. Second-quarter results were the first indication that his vision is bearing fruit, as costs fell, profits rose and the bank’s shares enjoyed a rare bump in connection with earnings. The picture appears to be different on the buy-side. Earlier this year, the head of Nordea’s wealth management unit, Snorre Storset, said he’s still hiring after adding about 75 people in a year.
Most research analysts covering the bank seem to approve of what it’s doing.