“我们分享同样的政治遗产，同样的宗教背景，相同类型的教育制度，世界的道德观点，”斯堪的纳维亚·诺德的监督委员会主席Hans Dalborg试图解释为什么他的银行的Smorgasbord将会解释最终成功地混合了它的四种主要成分：挪威的Christiaia Bank Og Kreditkasse，芬兰的Merita Bank，丹麦的Unidanmark和瑞典的NordBanken。“挪威人，芬兰人，丹麦斯和瑞典人分享了同一个价值的价值观，”达尔堡争夺。
One core tenet of Scandinavia's predominant Lutheranism undeniably applies to Nordea: justification by faith. The bank is a bold experiment in Nordic cooperation that critics say is as doomed as Queen Margaret I's 1397 Kalmar Union of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The biggest bank in Scandinavia, with E261.9 billion ($297.5 billion) in assets, E14 billion in market capitalization, 34,600 employees, 1,240 branches, 10.5 million retail customers and 500,000 business customers, Nordea was supposed to metamorphose from its merger spree as a vastly bulked up but still nimble regional player willing and able to take on all comers in an era of relentless consolidation among European banks (and Europe itself).
这可能已经成为Nordea的命运。但与此同时，这家银行的银行看起来很像一个斯德哥尔摩经济学案例研究，而且经常会有 - 跨境银行合并错误。而不是在其地理范围内扩展，Nordea的利润在2000年期间近一半到E887百万 - 当其最后一个大型银行组件建立在建立时，2002年。对任何成功的企业合并都不重要的成本切割物化;实际上，费用射击了。
Nordea's stock price, which soared to an all-time peak of 80 Swedish kronor ($8.40) in January 2001 on high hopes for merger synergies, had skidded 52 percent, to Skr38.70, by mid-July 2003. Contrast that with the average 23 percent drop for its five biggest rivals over the same period. And CEO Thorleif Krarup, who had formerly run Nordea constituent bank Unidanmark, was replaced in August 2002 after just 20 months on the job.
Nordea's current CEO, Lars Nordström, has had to modify Krarup's overly ambitious cost-cutting and market share targets. "In the present environment profitability and more efficient use of capital must and will come before positioning the bank to aggressively capture market share," Nordström concedes during an interview with亚博赞助欧冠in an airy, modern conference room on the top floor of Nordea's seven-story granite-and-glass headquarters in central Stockholm. His aim now is to improve efficiencies in small increments, emphasizing best practices and setting performance benchmarks to tide the bank over a lousy economic spell until it can invest more aggressively. "The costs related to the introduction of a single information technology system for retail customers are so huge as to be prohibitive," says Nordström of one of the pillars of the original Nordea blueprint.
But the bank's dramatically scaled-back ambitions "raise the question of why the merger went ahead in the first place," points out Standard & Poor's banking analyst Per Tornqvist. "Nordström's revised targets are basically an acknowledgement that extracting synergies from cross-border retail banking mergers is hugely difficult, if not impossible."
Just give him time, pleads Nordström, who ran Nordea's retail operation before becoming CEO in August 2002. "We still believe the pan-Nordic model will produce stronger, healthier results and better growth long term than the more domestically focused strategies" of Nordea's rivals, he insists.
Shareholders, however, may feel that the bank has tried their patience enough. Banking analyst Thomas Johansson of Enskilda Securities in Stockholm says, "It's fair to ask if the banks that created Nordea wouldn't be easier to manage and worth more on their own than as part of this group."
世界一流的潘北欧银行的愿景是Dalborg。成为瑞典的首席执行官后不久。1991年，Nordbanken 4世纪，他预见到欧洲推动货币联盟将导致银行业的动荡，因为大银行变得更大，小银行被吞噬。但他并没有满足于来自一群大陆的新兴兆纳斯人的收购报价。Dalborg希望Nordbanken成为追捕者之一，而不是猎物。
The odds against a regional bank like Nordbanken rising to pan-European prominence were daunting. Dalborg, however, faced a more immediate challenge: He had to ensure that Nordbanken survived at all. The government had been forced to rescue the bank -- Dalborg, a former chief operating officer of insurance giant Skandia, was brought in to overhaul management -- after Nordbanken flirted with failure in the 1990'91 recession because of commercial real estate loans that went sour.
Dalborg revamped Nordbanken's operations and emphasized mortgage and small-business lending, and by 1996 the bank was quite profitable. Much of it was reprivatized the previous year (the government still holds 18.5 percent), rewarding shareholders with a rising stock price. Still, even a revived Nordbanken, with its Skr338 billion in assets, was but a midsize player from one of Europe's smaller economies.
As Dalborg saw it, the bank had no choice but to expand aggressively beyond Sweden to fulfill its destiny of becoming a pan-Nordic, Europe-ready institution. His goal, the 62-year-old Dalborg now explains, was to create "a group that has the cross-border muscle that can bring us into the future."
因此，1997年，在他的肘部，诺德银行零售老板Nordström，达尔堡把他的大胆，甚至是标志的计划送进了运动。首先，他于1997年谈判与芬兰最大的金融服务公司Merita Bank的E3.8亿股所有股票合并。然后，在2000年，他为丹麦的第2届银行，UnIdAnmark和之后支付了25亿美元的股票购买挪威的第3届银行克里斯蒂亚亚银行，e3.3亿美元现金。三年多的三年多，达尔堡收购了三家银行，在联合资产中获得了160亿亿欧元。实际上，小NordBanken的大小有两倍多。
达尔堡设想的大部分都是通过的。银行正在合并;欧洲正在联合。和Nordea - 这个名字是“北欧”和“想法”的组合 - 已成为在斯堪的纳维亚和欧洲竞争对手的竞争中被忽视的力量。
但在一系列维京像袭击中如此迅速连续跨越了这么多边界，留下了越野高管，几乎没有时间和不注目地提出普通产品，协调数据处理或寻求这些难以捉摸的协同效应。例如，该银行仍然依靠十几个信息技术平台的拼凑而成，以运行其主要业务线：零售，企业和机构银行，资产管理和人寿保险。
"Back in 2000 Nordea gained a reputation as the strategy king of the region, with unprecedented cross-border mergers that offered the promise of realizing shareholder value much faster than rivals," says Garth Leder, a banking analyst at Fox-Pitt, Kelton in London. "Unfortunately, the group's fundamentals have been revealed as less than convincing."
CEONORDSTRÖM决心解决这些基本面。他需要降低期望以及成本。一方面，他无限期地预留了跨越Nordea整合后台行动的计划。一旦被吹捧为正确的规模经济所需的关键，这是正确的兆曼库等纽尔巴库，整合返回办公室已在很大程度上宣布，至少暂时出现。诺登斯特洛姆拥有特殊专业知识的地区尤其如此，庞大的零售银行。它占120岁的约69％的费用，而且2002年收入的近三分之三。
Today Dalborg basically blames former CEO Krarup -- from whom both he and Nordström are distancing themselves -- for having "overpromised when it came to efficiencies and returns." Declares Dalborg, "We needed to be more focused on producing profit than on implementing synergies, which are likely to be gradual."
Nordström appreciates profits. His catchphrase, say colleagues, is "Show me the money." Dalborg hired him a decade ago from Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, where he was one of three co-heads of retail. "Nordström was a performance-oriented banker who understood the importance of managing with simple, clear messages and goals," says Dalborg.
1943年出生于瑞典南部安静的大学镇，Nordström于1943年在乌普萨拉大学学习法律，于1970年离开，而不获得他的学位，在斯德哥尔摩的SEB总部进行营销工作。“我更喜欢银行业工作的相对独立，从事将在未来几年呼叫镜头的合作伙伴的干旱法律研究项目，”他说。从那里，他通过队伍上升，作为一个分支经理，然后在资产管理和房地产中。在加入Nordbanken之前，他在斯德哥尔摩和瑞典北部的斯德哥尔摩零售商业主任。今天，诺登斯特罗姆有一个26岁的女儿，与他的妻子在斯德哥尔摩以北90公里处生活在乌普萨拉。他喜欢听Puccini和Mahler，并在电视上观看阿森纳足球比赛。
Nordström共享Dalborg对Nordbanken的抱负。从1995年开始，政府通过斯德哥尔姆斯布尔森上的权利问题提供了100％的银行稳定销售，通过斯托霍姆斯布尔森的权利问题提供了一种准备的合并货币。起初，Dalborg和Nordström靠近家。他们讨论了与当时排名第一的Seb结合，以形成瑞典最大的银行的速度。但这笔交易掉了;Dalborg在瑞典最富有的家庭时表示，瓦伦伯格控制SEB，想要太多的公平。秘密的瓦伦伯格也可能越过越过与政府的风险太纠结。
Nordbanken的其他瑞典选项很快就关闭了。该国最大的零售银行Svenska Handelsbanken，于1997年2月购买了顶级抵押贷款人Stadshypotek Bank。另外两家大型的国内银行，Sparbanken和FöreningsBanken，将同月合并成为Föreningsparbanken。SEB本身于10月初与国内保险公司Trygg-Hansa合并。到1997年6月，瑞典的四大银行 - 包括Nordbanken - 控制了80％的国家贷款。保险业几乎集中了。
Dalborg and Nordström realized that Swedish antitrust authorities would block any further financial megamergers, so they began to look abroad for liaisons. In Finland they found a bank in a similar fix. Merita Bank, the country's largest retail operation, with a 40 percent share of that loan market, also had no real domestic merger options. Nordbanken and Merita consummated their merger of equals -- each had roughly E40 billion in assets -- in November 1997.
Over the next two years, the two banks largely succeeded in integrating their managements, with Dalborg becoming chief executive and Vesa Vainio, Merita's CEO, becoming chairman. But they kept their IT systems and retail banking product lines separate. Still, by 2000 the rechristened MeritaNordbanken hit its key financial bogeys, including at least E114 million in cost savings and a 16 percent return on equity. But that was largely because Dalborg sold off Merita's real estate assets and embraced the Finnish bank's existing expense-reduction program. Savings from consolidating overlapping operations were negligible -- the curse of most cross-border mergers.
With that deal under his belt, Dalborg issued an open invitation to banks in Denmark and Norway that were feeling confined in their home markets to join MeritaNordbanken and see Europe. The first to accept was Unidanmark, which became part of MeritaNordbanken in May 2000; Christiania Bank joined the club six months later. Both were significant retail banking groups, but Christiania was also a leading lender to the international shipping industry, and Unidanmark had merged the year before with Denmark's largest insurer, Tryg-Baltica.
Dalborg considered his strategy to be geared to the European Union's progressive economic integration (and its impending unified banking laws) but also very much attuned to Scandinavia. The Nordea boss spoke of the "common culture" of the Nordic states; he was fond of pointing out to investors that the banks all had similar lineages in that they'd grown through mergers of smaller banks.
In Nordea, Dalborg appeared at first to have formed a more cohesive Scandinavian union than Nordic politicians had ever achieved. A onetime lecturer at the Stockholm School of Economics, where he earned a Ph.D., he took pains to create a politically correct, seven-member executive board that rendered all decisions by consensus: It consisted of two Danes from Unidanmark, two Swedes from Nordbanken, two Finns from Merita and one Norwegian from Christiania (which had the least clout because it was the smallest of the banks).
Shareholders seemed pleased. Nordea's stock rose 43 percent in 2000, versus an average of 36 percent for the six largest Nordic banks, including Nordea.
But synergy can be as slippery as a Norwegian salmon. Although political differences among the four banks were largely smoothed over, pursuing integration targets in a coordinated fashion proved to be much more challenging. Consider one crucial assumption: that retail products could be made uniform and distributed efficiently across the region, permitting significant savings on overhead. Nordström, as head of retail banking, sat on the executive board, but the bank's top Danish and Finnish retail banking executives did not. Nor did the head of the relatively small Norwegian retail business. Operating more or less autonomously, they had little incentive to carry out integration initiatives promulgated in Stockholm. Concedes a senior Nordea official, "Synergy efforts got a lot less attention than they should have."
它落到了当时-48岁的Dane落到了Krarup，他们于2001年1月成为Nordea Ceo，将银行的Mishmash与跨境行动一起拉。以前，立体声Maker Bang＆Olufsen委员会的财务主管兼抵押贷款公司Teyg Nykredit Holding，Krarup在八个牛市上的数年里转为丹麦最大的共同基金集团。他在Unidanmark交易的后果晋升到Nordea Ceo“是谈判合并的总体图画的一部分，”Dalborg说，这是董事会的选择，而不是他的选择。
To achieve the objectives of Dalborg's game plan, Krarup adopted performance targets that turned out to be too aggressive. By 2004, he vowed, Nordea would be reaping annual savings of E720 million from vaguely defined technology initiatives, staff cuts and product synergies. The bank would also be returning 16 percent on equity and enjoying an excellent cost-to-income ratio of 50 percent.
Those figures now seem hopelessly out of reach. Between 2000 and 2002 Nordea's expenses soared 31.4 percent, to E3.8 billion. This was partly because Christiania was not yet consolidated into Nordea's accounts in 2000 but also because merging the various banks was proving to be costly. Moreover, Krarup failed to take adequate defensive measures as bond and stock markets plummeted in the group's first two years. Nordea's money management and life insurance operations posted a E122 million loss in 2002; Krarup is faulted for keeping more than 50 percent of the bank's E93 billion in managed assets in stocks.
Nordea's cost-to-income ratio took a direct hit when the bank was forced to contribute E272 million to an employee pension fund to counterbalance market losses. Nordea's return on equity collapsed, from 16.1 percent in 2000 to 7.5 percent last year, and the bank's cost-to-income ratio moved the wrong way, jumping from 58 percent to 65 percent.
与此同时，银行的留在家庭竞争对手一般更好。例如，Svenska Handelsbanken去年管理了14.6％的獐鹿，52％的成本比率。丹麦的Danske Bank拥有14％的ROE和57％的成本收入率。
Krarup于2002年8月辞职为首席执行官，引用了个人原因。他于2001年经历了离婚，而不是长久离开他的妻子和三个十几岁的儿子，从哥本哈根到斯德哥尔摩。然而，Dalborg明确说明，下降并不完全是Krarup的决定。虽然Krarup与资产管理和企业融资系统协调，但销售了一般的一般人寿保险行动，但他在最重要的卫生间失败了：整合了零售业务的不同部分。
“董事会可以看到，我们没有达到我们的目标，”krarup]可以看出，“Dalborg说。“是时候做某事了。”然而，在一个奇怪的情况下虽然没有悬剑纳维亚的扭曲，但Krarup在哥本哈根留在哥本哈根的一半，这是与大型企业借款人关系的高级副总裁。他拒绝接受采访。
Nordström，Dalborg的男人，不是拍摄Krarup的崇高目标。在去年11月的伦敦分析师和投资者的介绍中，首席执行官仅承诺冻结未来两年的总支出。他2005年股权回报的目标是15％;为了收入，55％。
北欧联合在削弱其庞大的劳动力:bank is laying off 1,200 people, a relatively modest 3.5 percent of the total. That still leaves it with an average of 18 employees per branch, compared with 14 for the typical Nordic bank. "In bad times we should protect our core business -- serving our retail customers," says Nordström. "To downsize that asset would be a high-risk move when it comes to future growth."
该银行经营欧洲最大的网上银行业务，拥有330万客户，但成功尚未允许重大分支机构。“我们可以逐渐关闭一些分支，但不是大量的分支机构，”博拉尔德（Herita Bank Veteran）从赫尔辛基运行Nordea的电子银行业务。“即使越来越多的人在北欧国家正在通过互联网进行交易和付款，我们发现的是，我们需要在分支机构中通过抵押贷款等事物甚至出售我们的网上银行服务。“
Nordström确实打算将年度削减了20％的百分之一年，即今年的e360万，并且他任命了该银行的集团加工和技术副首席执行官 - Finn Markku Pohjola - 完成任务。“我的使命是尽可能地团结它和后台处理，以便我们的其余高管能够集中精力销售，”曾先前领先的零售和企业银行的Pohjola说。断言Nordström，“如果我们无法完全集成技术，我们已经在客户信息，记录，营销和定价方面找到并应用了最佳实践。”然而，Nordea与IBM Corp.谈判，以形成合资企业，以承担所有后台行动。
Nordström已在纽约和伦敦关闭了Nordea Securities的办事处，并将经纪和投资银行部门的员工切碎了近三分之一至400.“我们致力于改变，终止或销售不表现的行动，这就是一个例子其中，“Nordström说。
Nordström通过将四名成员视为“国家高级管理人员”来改造执行局。例如，Pohjola是芬兰国家首席。首席执行官还将所有四个零售银行院长关于执行局，其中包括芬兰的Kari Jordan，他现在负责所有零售银行，以及彼得·舒（PeterSchütze，在担任丹麦的国家主管时负责监督人力资源。“我们现在有一个执行集团，可以快速评估我们应该坚持的企业，使我们的运营适应市场条件，并有效监督从一个市场转移到另一个市场的最佳实践转移，”Nordström说。
他对泛北欧联盟的方法听起来像欧盟的口号，“通过多样性的团结”。解释Nordström：“我们仍然用于泛北欧协同效应，但在许多情况下，我们正在寻求统一而不是集成。这归结为调整在不同IT系统中的相同程序和业务的方式，横跨不同的IT系统有不同规则的市场。“
作为一个例子，他指向零售客户分为三个部分：基本，中级和核心。每两年，每年都有一些E4,000和E14,000，更有可能购买相互资金或取出信用卡等高利润消费贷款产品。“通过将我们的客户群划分如此，”Nordström说：“我们可以拥有相同的基本系统，用于营销我们的服务和所有市场的客户随访，导致收入和成本协同效应。”
The Nordea chief is being cautious about cross-selling, the chimera that has captivated so many bankers over the years --including Dalborg. The bank's huge retail and business customer base, which reaches into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in addition to the four Nordic countries, should offer abundant opportunities to standardize products and pare costs. But as Nordström acknowledges, "Back in 2000 we thought we could transfer cross-border product offerings on long-term savings, notably in mutual funds and life insurance, but with depressed stock and bond markets, those opportunities have not been there to the extent that anyone thought they would be."
这个问题可能不仅仅是糟糕的市场。The Nordic countries' supposed common culture turns out to be vastly complicated by different national psyches, languages, currencies and legal and accounting systems. Consumers' product preferences as well as banks' funding approaches vary greatly from country to country, making it difficult to create uniform products and unify back-office operations. "You can go down the entire product list, and you will find local preferences and differences that increase the expense of operating this bank," says S&P analyst Tornqvist.
Life insurance is the primary savings vehicle in Norway and Finland, for example, but policies must be structured differently in each country because of tax considerations. Denmark and Sweden are big markets for equity mutual funds; Norway and Finland much less so. Most mortgages in Finland and Norway have floating interest rates, while in Denmark and Sweden rates tend to be fixed.
The difficulty of coordinating strategies across borders shows up glaringly in Nordea's handling of bad debt. Some analysts have been questioning the bank's credit-risk management. Nordea's quarterly loan-loss charges have risen steadily, from E45 million in the first quarter of 2001 to E98 million in this year's first quarter. The bank's nonperforming loan ratio, at 1.9 percent, is low by European standards but is still the highest among the Nordic region's major banks. And one subsidiary, the former Christiania, reported E109 million in new nonperforming loans in the fourth quarter of 2002, bringing its NPL ratio to 3.9 percent. Nordea officials say that many of the Norwegian loans had previously been written off at group level but were being recorded on the subsidiary's books because of accounting technicalities. Still, as Fox-Pitt, Kelton analyst Leder says, "the fact that different parts of the bank have been writing off loans at different times makes you wonder how successfully they are applying truly standard credit policies at what remain four different national banks."
由于Nordström的11月与分析师聊天以来，Nordea的股票在SKR40周围的狭窄范围内交易。这可以被解释为暂定的信任投票 - 如果不是恰好展示热情 - 在普遍的乳房，右下方的瑞典人。尽管如此，没有其他欧洲银行已经尝试过任何像欧洲的东西。已经制定了一些跨国公司的银行兼并涉及一个大银行购买较小的银行，例如汇丰银行在三年前为e110亿购买法国的Crédit商业德法国。收购方以适度的成本获得了新市场的访问 - 不必面对现在面对Dalborg和Nordström的银行的整合挑战。
“Nordea旋转了一系列巧妙的横销产品甚至切割成本，但他们将如何做到这一点跨越这样的不同市场的细节总是缺乏，”欧洲银行竞争对手说。“他们的经验将使任何正在寻求增长和通过跨境合并的效率的银行进行两次。”
虽然仍然致力于泛北欧的愿景，但Nordström可能有自己的第二个想法。“在某种程度上，”他卫资地说：“我们现在所做的只是一个提高表现的问题，而不完全没有任何一体化。”