Another Inspiring Leader in a world gone #Digital – Lotta Lovén at Swedbank - Part 1

My name is Lotta Lovén. I'm head of Swedbank. I have been there since late 2014, so it's a rather new challenge for me. Before that, I was working only with the digital channels and developing them for the last five years. But I have done many things within the financial sector: I have been a branch manager, I have been working with our large corporate and investment area, I have been doing marketing, and I have been a real estate manager. I have been outside the bank building a total online bank, and I think that's where my interest for the digital area first occurred. I understood how much power you have in the digital meeting and how much you can do from that.

I think that the financial companies affect so many people. Everyone has a relationship to their economy, and we can provide things that improve the private and corporate customers' help to gain more efficient and a better economy. For us, we are the biggest bank in Sweden. It's a tremendous opportunity to work with four and a half million private customers and more than half a million corporate customers with their daily banking and their advanced financial needs. We really affect many people and many corporates. It's really inspiring.

They will not get rid of me. Maybe I'm a little bit Swedish here, but I have always done this: I have always approached the top management leaders because I want them to be ambassadors for our services. If most of our customers use the digital services, of course the top management has to do it as well. For example, we are now creating the new digital bank, and I have from the start said that both the board and the top management team are of course the first pilots. They are the ones testing and every third week have to answer questions about what's working and what can be improved, so we can bring it on in further development. I have also taken the opportunities to be at the right meetings in the right places, so I'm often invited to top management meetings and board meetings to speak about this, as well as going out to the branches and trying to ensure everyone understands the importance and inspiration in this.

I think I do. I think that curiosity is one important thing, and also willing to change and have the bravery to change things that have been done the same way for many, many years. It hurts a little bit to go through digitalization, since for our kind of company we have been in the market for 200 years doing loans, doing savings, doing things in approximately the same way. When you understand that you are going to change to digital processes and digital price models and digital relations, you have to be brave enough as a leader of a company to understand and start that journey because it's not by itself. In some content we are at the forefront. I would say we have about four and a half million private customers and among them 90% are already using our digital services. So the customers use what we provide them, but we have not done this from the perspective that we are a digital company. We have done this from the perspective that we add the digital channel on top of the traditional channels. I think that we are in the midst of understanding that digital is the name within our business and we are doing some transformation because the customers don't visit us in the branches. We have to make changes to adapt. We are continuously adapting, but it's recently that we have understood fully the consequences of the digital relationships.

How exciting. And in this journey, what do you think is most surprising? Personally I have two reflections: one from a customer perspective, and that's that the customers adopt advanced services. I have one example when we launched our first version of the mobile bank. We included a service to buy and sell stocks through the mobile phone, and I said 'This will be a nice feature but nobody will use it.' Now I think we have 25% of our total stock transactions through mobile. That's what we provide our customers with; they use it immediately. They are more advanced than we realized. That's one reflection. The other is that the transformation journey will be so much more complex than we understood initially, because the old systems from banks are very heavy and very old and not really prepared for digital transformation. We have to focus on that to be successful and be at the forefront.