“One of the great things in working with Intrum Justitia is the company’s commitment to treating our defaulting customers fairly while also keeping a good recovery rate.
We appreciate Intrum Justitia’s commitment to developing straightforward, systematic and transparent collection processes that respect our customers and add value to our operations. That Intrum Justitia’s values largely parallel ours is a principal reason we’ve chosen to partner with them in Nordic markets like Finland, Norway and Sweden.”
Karsten Wakeford-Wesmann, Nordea’s Nordic Head of Debt Collection in Account Products Services.
Background
Nordea is a leading Nordic bank, ranking first or second in most of its northern European markets, and with more than 11 million customers and a network of 1,400 branches. In 2010, Nordea Bank had a total operating profit of 9.3 billion Euros.
Nordea’s Debt Collection organization works as the back office for the bank’s network of 1,400 branches serving its 11 million customers. The bank’s loan losses ratio annualized equaled a base points (bps) percentage of 0.31 of the total amount lent out to individual and corporate customers in 2010.
Solution
For Nordea, it is important that suppliers like Intrum Justitia share and deliver on its beliefs. Nordea works with credit management services suppliers in each of its markets as part of its strategy to stay focused on the core banking business. Nordea does not want to build a huge in house debt collection unit and hence working with suppliers gives them the opportunity to benchmark collection results more efficiently.
Nordea’s approach when an individual or a client company gets into a default situation is very much about looking at the problem through their eyes. They believe they have a better chance of getting paid – and retaining a customer – if they try to understand the reasons behind the default and try to find solutions to the problem that benefit all sides.
Here you can read more about the solution for Nordea