Nordea intends to lay off around 6000 jobs, including employees and consultants. The bank is planning to remove around 2000 consultants under the transformation shift.

The bank has started transformation process two years back through investing in technology such as core banking platform, digital banking and IT remediation.

The transformation process is expected to save up to €150m for the bank in the fourth quarter of this year.

Nordea CEO Casper von Koskull said: “We are almost two years into the transformation of Nordea. Since investments are starting to deliver, it is time to enter the next phase, in which we see that we can structurally bring down costs and increase efficiency

“This transformation would not have been possible without our strong balance sheet and robust business model. In the coming years we will achieve economies of scale by taking our centres of excellence to the next level and create efficient and automated operations.”

In July, Nordea partnered with Estonian startup Feelingstream to reduce response time for queries from its customers.

The bank decided to deploy a software developed by the startup, which uses artificial intelligence (AI).

The AI-powered software has the capability to automatically analyse text from hundreds of customers’ queries per second. This, according to the bank can open up a broad range of applications.


Image: Nordea global headquarters in Stockholm. Photo: courtesy of Holger.Ellgaard.