Nordea Bank Polska is the biggest subsidiary of the Nordea Group in Poland. The bank has been developing very fast since its establishment, offering state-of-the-art products and services, and achieving excellent financial results. Nordea Bank Polska closed the year 2008 with record profits, in spite of the turmoil on the financial market, which started in the third quarter. The good performance continued into the first quarter of this year.

Such outstanding results are owing to tremendous increase in the bank's business volumes. Lending grew 47%, while customer deposits 30%. This is a much higher growth rate than those characterizing the whole Polish banking sector. The bank gains market shares with its modern product range, expanded last year with new attractive products, among others Nordea Spektrum – a free personal account offering free-of-charge cash withdrawals from any ATM belonging to any operator in Poland and all Nordea ATMs worldwide. Another killer product is Nordea Habitat – an attractively priced housing loan with a long credit term and a wide choice of currencies. Nordea offers it also in Swiss francs, being one of very few banks that still offer such a currency option.

What also contributed to the increased business volumes was the realisation of one of the bank's strategic projects – a project code-named Turbo, consisting in the dynamic expansion of the branch network by the year 2009. By the end of 2008, 100 new branch offices had been opened and in 2008 alone – 60. At the end of last year, the bank had 145 branch offices, which means that their number had tripled within just 24 months. Now the bank offers its services through 158 branch offices, concentrated mainly in the key agglomerations of Poland.



The high quality and the appreciation by customers of Nordea's products and services is proved by numerous awards they have won and the high places the bank achieved in various ranking lists. For example, Nordea's net-bank came top in the latest edition of Newsweek's „Friendly Bank” ranking list and it was awarded the European Medal by the Business Centre Club and the Office of the Committee for European Integration. Last year, the Bank received the EUROBRAND and EUROPRODUCT distinctions for the net-banking solution for people with an eyesight dysfunction, which it implemented as the first bank in Europe. It was a great honour for Nordea to be awarded the title of the Leader of Polish Business by the Business Centre Club - Nordea Bank Polska was the only commercial bank to have received such a title.



In 2008, Forbes gave Nordea four stars out of five in the ranking list of the best banks for SMEs. The magazine's experts acknowledged the highest interest rate offered on the current account, the low prices of services and the good overdraft.



In the first quarter of 2009, Nordea Bank once again proved to be an institution consistently putting on stable profits, keeping its promises and putting in practice its development plans, in spite of the financial turmoil. Nordea Bank Polska is the only one of the Top 20 Polish banks to have recorded an increase in the gross profit, which grew 7 per cent (nearly PLN 36.4m) compared to the first quarter of 2008. The bank was ranked third in terms of the growth in the balance sheet total (Q1 2009/Q1 2008) with 58.9%.

Both the operating profit and the gross profit increased, on the back of a 58.7% increase in the business volume, the main driver once again being loans and advances to customers. Lending to households showed the highest growth dynamics (114% up). Similar was the case of liabilities – customer deposits grew the most (44%). Thus it is clear that the expanded network of offices, active sales activities and effective marketing bring the expected results.