Read about Aktia's year 2023
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Helping customers in changing times
We strive to help and support our customers to increase their wealth. We seek to make our customers’ everyday activities easier by ensuring that their banking affairs are handled with ease. We provide household customers with comprehensive banking and financing services, insurances, as well as investment products and advisory services through various channels. We are a financial advisory partner to our corporate customers, and we strive to enhance the companies’ opportunities for success and the owners’ financial well-being.
A successful year behind us
2023 was marked by increased uncertainty in the world, which was also reflected in the banking business. Overall inflation, persistently high interest rates and the challenging situation in the housing market were reflected in cautious behaviour among consumers and customers.
Investors and savers were interested in fixed-term deposits, and demand for them remained strong among both private and corporate customers. The year was also good for consumer financing. The Finnair Visa Credit card launched last year was particularly successful, bringing a record number of new customers to Aktia during 2023.
The quality of the credit portfolio remained good and net interest income on the credit portfolio developed positively. The average margin of the entire loan book also increased. At the same time, however, demand for mortgages continued to fall. The construction of new dwellings slowed down, which meant that demand for financing for new-build housing projects (RS financing) was modest.
The corporate customer business continued to grow, and the balance sheet grew as planned. Demand for hire purchase and leasing financing remained strong, and customers were also interested in working capital solutions.
At the beginning of the year, a new Business Banking team was launched at Aktia, focusing on serving smaller business customers. Aktia’s strategy focuses on excellent customer experience, and the aim of the new team is to improve customer experience especially for small business customers. We succeeded in this, and we received positive feedback from customers about the change. Customer satisfaction among corporate customers in the banking business was also good – the corporate customer NPS was 30.
In 2023, we continued to invest in excellent customer experience in accordance with our strategy, for example by developing our digital services and increasing the number of staff in Aktia’s customer service.