Nordea


Nordea Bank Abp, commonly referred to as Nordea, is a European financial services group operating in northern Europe and based in Helsinki, Finland. The bank is the result of the successive mergers and acquisitions of the Finnish, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish banks of Merita Bank, Unibank, Kreditkassen and Nordbanken that took place between 1997 and 2000. The Baltic states are today also considered part of the home market. The largest shareholder of Nordea is Sampo, a Finnish insurance company with around 20% of the shares. Nordea is listed on the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, Helsinki Stock Exchange and Stockholm Stock Exchange.
Nordea operates across both the Nordic and Baltic regions with over 1,400 branches. The bank is present in 20 countries around the world, operating through full-service branches, subsidiaries and representative offices, although it primarily provides services in Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Nordea serves 11 million private and 700,000 active corporate customers. The group also operates an Internet bank, which has more than 5.9 million online customers and performs more than 260 million payments per year.

History

Nordea is the result of the successive mergers and acquisitions of the Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian banks of Nordbanken, Merita Bank, Unibank and Kreditkassen that took place between 1997 and 2000.
PK-banken was formed in 1974 by a merger between Postbanken and Sveriges Kreditbank, both state-owned.
The private Nordbanken was formed in 1986 by a merger of two smaller private local banks, Uplandsbanken and Sundsvallsbanken. The Swedish banking crisis of 1991, resulting from deregulated markets and a housing price bubble, forced the government to nationalise Nordbanken for 64 billion kronor. Bad debts were transferred to the asset-management companies Securum and Retriva, which sold off the assets.
The name Nordea comes from the Swedish bank Nordbanken; this developed from PK-banken which in 1990 purchased the smaller private bank Nordbanken, and picked up that name. The name is also a contraction of the words Nordic and ideas.
Merita Bank was a 1995 merger of the former main rivals in Finland, the originally Svecoman Union Bank of Finland founded in 1862 and the Fennoman National Share Bank founded in 1889.
Nordea was the subject of an online phishing scam in 2007. The company estimated 8 million kr was stolen. Customers were targeted over a period of 15 months with phishing emails containing a trojan horse. Nordea refunded affected customers.
Nordea converted its subsidiaries operating in Denmark, Finland, and Norway to branches under the Swedish holding company, Nordea AB, in January 2017. In August 2017, DNB ASA and Nordea combined their operations in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to create Luminor Bank.
Nordea announced plans to move its corporate headquarters to Helsinki, Finland in September 2017. In October 2018, Nordea completed the move of its corporate headquarters to Helsinki, Finland.
In March 2019, public service broadcasting company, Yle, aired a program that revealed money laundering allegations against Nordea. The company was the biggest Nordic lender allegedly involved in the multi-million-dollar money laundering scheme, according to Bloomberg.
In October 2019, Nordic banks agreed to fund common payment services in order to boost businesses.

Ownership

Nordea is owned by:
  1. Sampo, 21.3%
  2. Nordea Fonden, 3.9%
  3. Swedbank Robur Funds, 3.3%
  4. AMF Insurance and Funds, 2.1%

    Nordea Markets

Nordea Markets is the international markets operation of Nordea. It handles a broad range of investment banking products and services including fixed income, currencies, commodities, equities, debt capital markets, and corporate finance. It also supplies advisory services and internationally acknowledged economic research and analysis.
There are approximately 2,200 employees including Financial Risk Control and Capital Markets Services. Its main operational centres are in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm, and with regional offices also in Brazil, China, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and United States.

Panama document leak

The largest financial group in the Nordic region, Nordea has, despite warnings from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority been active in using offshore companies in tax havens according to the Panama papers.
The Nordea section in Luxembourg, between the years 2004 and 2014, founded nearly 400 offshore companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands for its customers.
The Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority has pointed out that there are "serious deficiencies" in how Nordea monitors money laundering, and has given the bank two warnings. In 2015, Nordea had to pay the largest possible fine - over 5 million EUR.
In 2012, Nordea asked Mossack Fonseca to change documents retroactively so that three Danish customers power of attorney documents had been in force since 2010.
The director for Nordea Private banking Thorben Sanders admits that before 2009 they did not screen for customers that tried to evade tax. "At the end of 2009 we decided that our bank should not be a means of tax evasion" says Thorben Sanders.
As a consequence of the leaked documents, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority stated on 4 April 2016 that it had started an investigation into the conduct of Nordea, the largest financial group in the Nordic region. The Swedish minister of Finance Magdalena Andersson characterized the conduct of Nordea as "a crime" and "totally unacceptable". Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull stated that he was disappointed with the shortcomings within Nordea's operating principles, saying that "this cannot be tolerated".
Other Swedish banks are mentioned in the documents, but mention of Nordea occurs 10,902 times and the second-most mentioned bank has 764 matches.
Stefan Löfven, Prime Minister of Sweden, said in 2016 that he was very critical of the conduct of Nordea and its role, and said "Â- They are on the list of shame too".

Tax evasion and the Paradise Papers

Nordea bank loaned billions of euros to shipping companies that own vessels in secrecy jurisdictions such as Bermuda, Cyprus, Panama, BVI, the Cayman Islands and the Isle of Man. In the Paradise Papers, Nordea was shown to have lent a significant amount of money to customers based in tax havens.

Subsidiaries