Norddeutsche Landesbank

Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale
Public-law institution
Industry Banking
Founded July 1, 1970
Headquarters Hanover, Germany
Key people
 Thomas Bürkle (CEO)
Peter-Jürgen Schneider (Pres. of supervisory board)
Products Financial services
Total assets Decrease € 181 billion (2015)
Number of employees
 6,343 (2015)
Website www.nordlb.com

The Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale (abbreviated NORD/LB) is a German Landesbank and one of the largest commercial banks in Germany. It is a public corporation owned by the federal states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt with its head office in Hanover and branches in Braunschweig and Magdeburg.

NORD/LB head office in Hanover designed by Behnisch Architekten

Business

NORD/LB was established in 1765 as Braunschweigische Staatsbank. The main areas of specialization of NORD/LB are investment banking, agricultural and real estate banking, corporate finance, ship and aircraft financing and private banking. NordLB maintains branch offices in all major financial and trading centers, including London, Singapore and New York City. Today, NORD/LB is Germany's largest bank for national and international bond issues.

Before the financial crisis of 2007–2008, NORD/LB, like many German banks, pushed into lending to companies transporting the world's burgeoning trade in goods and raw materials, propelling Germany to the top spot in ship lending worldwide.[1] Following the crisis, it joined peers such as HSH Nordbank, Commerzbank, Deutsche Hypothekenbank and KfW in taking large writedowns and boosting capital buffers against the risk of shipping loans turning sour.[2] By 2016, the bank saw a record loss of 1.96 billion euros ($2.1 billion), caused by 2.94 billion euros in provisions for bad shipping loans.[3] As a result, it took full control of its loss-making Bremer Landesbank (BLB) unit, which suffered particularly from a weak shipping market that was chipping away at its capital.[4] Between 2016 and 2017, the bank unsuccessfully led negotiating on selling a $1.5 billion portfolio of shipping loans to KKR Credit and a sovereign wealth fund.[5][6] By late 2016, NORD/LB still had about 8 billion euros in non-performing shipping loans in its books.[7] It also tasked N M Rothschild & Sons with advising it on options for its restructuring, which could include the sale of Deutsche Hypothekenbank.[8]

In recent years, NORD/LB has developed a range of partners to bundle loan portfolios and place them with investors, working with insurers Talanx and ERGO Group, Bankhaus Lampe and Bavarian pension fund Bayerische Versorgungskammer (BVK). Its lending business runs on a joint IT platform with BayernLB.[9]

Art collection

In 1985 NORD/LB started to build up an art collection with the aim of representing post-1945 modern art in an international context. The collection today comprises about 3,000 artworks, still with an emphasis on postwar art, including Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis and Jörg Immendorff, among others.[10] Employees can use the works to decorate the buildings, and they are displayed within the bank's own exhibition program. In 1999 it was able to open the exhibition space of its own.

In 2009, NORD/LB returned Franz Marc's Cat Behind a Tree (1910), a painting the bank had bought in 1983, to the descendant of a Jewish shoe-manufacturing family persecuted by the Nazis; the bank had loaned the painting long-term to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 2012, the bank sold its Jeff Koons sculpture, Tulips (1995-2004), from the “Celebration” series. The bank will use the proceeds to set up a foundation to promote contemporary art and cultural projects in northern Germany.[11]

In China

See also

References

Coordinates: 52°22′3″N 9°44′29″E / 52.36750°N 9.74139°E / 52.36750; 9.74139

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