Nordic and Baltic regional awards
 |
Best Bank: Nordea |
Although third-ranked Svenska Handelsbanken is growing its assets rapidly, Nordea continues to be the benchmark in Swedish banking: it dwarfs its rivals in terms of scale and returns a market-leading 22.31% on equity. Impressively, in 2006 the gap between the bank’s income and cost growth was 5.4 percentage points, highlighting the remarkable efficiencies that it has attained in recent years. The troubles that beset Nordea in the early years of this decade following its creation seem a distant memory and the bank can rightly be proud of its status as one of the best-performing banks in its peer group for shareholder returns: over the past four years Nordea has produced a total shareholder return in the top quartile of the European banking sector. In the public debt markets, Barclays Capital and ABN Amro go head to head at the top of the league table for the year to the end of March 2007, with Barclays having a 10.37% market share and ABN Amro 7.97%. Were a merger between the two banks to occur, a combined entity could truly tower over the competition in the country.