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Nils Melngailis, Erkki Raasuke
Following the decision of the European Commission, Nordea and DNB have succesfully combined their operations in the Baltic countries creating a new bank – Luminor.
Luminor is a new stand-alone Baltic bank and financial services provider with independent governance and an arm’s length relationship with the parent banks. The merger will position Luminor as a top 3 player in the Baltic banking market with a 16% market share in deposits and 23% of the lending market. The total gross lending of Luminor will amount to approximately EUR 12bn, including consumer and corporate lending and EUR 9bn in deposits. Luminor will be capitalised at 17% Common Equity Tier 1 capital in the amount of EUR 1.6bn.
On 1 October 2017 Luminor has launched its operations under a new, experienced management team representing seven nationalities, managed by the Chief Executive Officer Erkki Raasuke. Luminor’s Country Managers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are Gunnar Toomemets, Kerli Gabrilovica and Andrius Nacajus. Nils Melngailis is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Luminor Group AB.
“With the creation of Luminor we want to transform the Baltic banking industry. Luminor is explicitly for the Baltics, its people and businesses with sufficient scale and local decisionmaking”says Nils Melngailis. Chairman of Luminor Group AB. “Under the close supervision by the ECB and country regulators, Luminor’s governance structure has been created following the best industry practices and will allow us to ensure prudent risk management, at the same time ensuring good pace in developing our own services and partnerships with other institutions and third parties. We will make significant investments in Luminor’s technological capabilities to create a contemporary, fully digital financial services provider in coming years.”
Luminor´s brand value lies in its deep relationship with its customers and services. Luminor will build up its business model in a way that supports regional scale, business development and efficiency but also high local relevance and customer intimacy.
“Today’s financial services’ landscape is much wider than traditional banking, and tech companies will soon be encroaching on previous banking territory. To be relevant to its customers and leave a positive mark, Luminor will focus on delivering the core offering itself while cooperating with other companies. This also means that we want Luminor over the time to become the best financial ecosystem for our target customers,” says Erkki Raasuke, CEO of Luminor. “We will combine our Nordic roots, knowledge and long-term experience with local and personalised customer relations together with modern and forward-looking technology. Our main customers will be local companies and financially active people with an entrepreneurial mind-set.”
According to the agreements reached between Nordea Bank AB (publ) and DNB Bank ASA in August 2016, both banks have agreed to combine their Baltic operations into a jointly owned banking group named Luminor.
About the business transfer
During the completion of the combinations of operations, all assets and liabilities of Nordea’s branches in all three Baltic States have been transferred to DNB’s legal entities and the entities were renamed Luminor. At the same time, the shares in Nordea’s finance and pension companies were acquired by the DNB entities. For a certain period, customer’s account numbers, agreements and payment cards as well as codes and passwords will remain unchanged. Moreover, the contractual obligations will remain effective and Luminor will continue providing financial services as usual. For the time being, customer accounts and payment processing will be maintained in the current core banking systems. Thus, customers will keep using the existing banking solutions – Netbank, mobile bank and others. More visible changes to the current product and service offerings are planned to take place in first quarter of next year. We will provide timely information and additional updates regarding new products and services as they are launched at Luminor.