Annika Falkengren: banking survivor with a trader's gut instincts

One weekend late last year, Annika Falkengren received an email on her BlackBerry from a disgruntled customer. The customer complained that, on calling SEB's telephone line, a voice had told them they were number 36 in line, irritating them greatly.

The chief executive of the Swedish bank swung into action and dialled the telephone bank herself. She soon got back in touch with the customer, informing them that SEB normally handles an average of 80 calls every five minutes, making the wait much shorter than it might appear. "They said 'oh, I got an answer'," the 51-year-old chief executive recalls.

This is the kind of personal touch Ms Falkengren has brought to the job since taking over as SEB's chief executive eight years ago. She says that when she meets the bosses of big German Mittelstand companies they often say she is the first bank chief executive they have met.

Ms Falkengren is that rarest of beasts - not just a female chief executive but one heading a bank. At the start of the interview in her spacious office in the bank's Stockholm headquarters, she laments that when she became chief executive she expected that to change. "There still hasn't been that much of an increase".

However, the rarity factor is not just about her gender. In a sector in which the chief executive merry-go-round has spun rapidly since the 2007-08 financial crisis, Ms Falkengren is one of the few bank bosses still standing.

Part of that is down to performance. SEB's share price has returned to the level when she started as chief executive eight years ago, whereas shares in the average European bank are only 40 per cent of the way there.

Part is also due to SEB's position since 1856 as the house bank for the Wallenberg family, which still holds the chairmanship of SEB and is well known for its long-term focus.

The crisis certainly took its toll on SEB as its share price fell by nearly 90 per cent amid worries about its exposure to the Baltic region. However, Ms Falkengren, who has worked at the bank since graduating in business administration and economics from university in 1987, was able to draw on her experience of the deep Nordic financial crisis in the early 1990s.

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But those in the bank with experience from the 1990s crisis proved vital in dealing with the fallout after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, especially in the Baltics, where the situation was direst. "In 2008 we were very clear, saying we should exit the crisis as a stronger bank than we entered the crisis. That was an internal mantra we had. And how do we do this? We do it by sticking to our clients this time," she says.

Unlike many of its Swedish rivals, SEB has only a relatively small retail bank and is more focused on big corporate clients in the Nordics, Baltics or Germany.

Senior managers met around the meeting table in Ms Falkengren's office four times a day - at 7am, 11am, 3pm, 7pm and later by phone each evening at 10pm. The first priority was to safeguard the bank so in early 2009 it launched a rights issue to shore up its balance sheet.

Ms Falkengren says her background as a trader was an advantage inthose frenzied times. "It was a really strong thing in the crisis because you learn on the trading floor to make decisions rather quickly, because you have to. You can't really wait on things."

As a supervisory board member at Volkswagen - the only one not allied with a big shareholder - she is a fan of the automotive analogy. "We used to visualise [the crisis] by saying this car went into a pit stop." Shortly afterwards, she adds: "I used to say that we had a V8 engine but we only used a V4. And we are still not up to the V8 so we can take on a lot more clients on this engine today without adding more costs."

She says her aim is to show that such banks can be as reliable and safe, as well as profitable, as retail lenders. "We're a Nordic, predictable, corporate bank, which is quite unique in the world because most regulators seem to say that you can only be a predictable bank if you are a retail bank . . .

"For me boring means predictable. And historically SEB has had too much excitement - we've been too much into the M&A, having crises here and there."

Ms Falkengren says she almost stumbled into banking. After finishing boarding school, she spent a summer working in a branch of SEB in Stockholm.

She liked it, and they asked her to stay so she postponed university for a couple of years. After her degree she came back as a trainee and soon worked her way up through the trading division.

She recalls how she once discovered that some traders outside Stockholm had made a good profit one month and she could not understand how.

It turned out they had been exceeding trading limits, she says. "But they made a profit, so should we be happy or not happy?" She was "extremely unhappy" and the traders were fired.

She then broadened her horizons by becoming head of the corporate and institutions division in 2001 and three years later was promoted to deputy chief executive and heir apparent.

The personal touch she has brought to the job includes holding weekly meetings open to all staff. "Any question and I answer it. I get questions such as 'why do they have fruit baskets in that department and we don't?' to very serious things such as 'I've heard that we are closing that operation here, what do you know about that?' So it's high and low, but it also gives you a lot of flavour of what's going on," she says.

Challenges remain. She says she feels like she is only in "the middle of the journey", having taken over aged 42. Gaps between SEB and some Swedish banking rivals still exist in profitability and customer satisfaction, she adds.

Then there is the pressure of being a top female executive. "I always dread the questions; 'So, Annika, what do you do on your free time?' I hate when they ask that question because I sound so boring."

She says when not working she spends time with her family, not doing "a triathlon [or] cooking a three-star dinner". She is married with a nine-year-old daughter.

She adds: "It's a little bit challenging being a senior woman. I always look at the men who have their bags packed [for them], and I have to pack my own bag."

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