Nordea hit as top staff walk away over retrenchment of 6 000 employees

NORDEA Bank has recently lost a number of its top sellside 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, 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. “It creates an incredible unease in the organisation, where the positioning of the managers prevails over the business skills,” he said in an email. “The individuals that care about the clients get no room to be heard, therefore they quit.”