Nordea Loses Top Sell-Side Bankers as Cuts Start Hitting Morale

Nordea Bank AB has recently lost a number of its top sell-side bankers amid complaints that management’s focus on cutting 6,000 jobs is hurting morale in key parts of the business.

Examples of recent departures include the head of fixed income at Nordea Markets, Torben Pedersen. He’s in the process of starting his own hedge fund with Erik Bo Hansen, who used to be Nordea’s head of global trading at its fixed-income, currencies and commodities unit. The chief sales manager at Nordea Markets, Bjarne Hammeken, left to work for the Danish fund HP Fondsmaeglerselskab. Jan Erik Nilsen, who used to be the head of fixed-income sales at Nordea Markets in Oslo, left for a similar role at SEB AB, a competing Swedish bank.