Inflation has finally managed what banks have been trying to for years – get women investors into equities, CEO George Falkner said.
Everything is becoming more expensive but I am not getting anything on my account: George Falkner has been hearing that often. Although he has only been running the Swiss online arm of Danish lender Saxo Bank since last December, he has dealt with the pandemic, the Ukraine war, rising interest rates – and higher inflation. According to him, those same factors are driving his clients and an increasing proportion of them are women.
One-third of our new clients are female», the CEO said, who finds himself running a pure-play digital bank after a career in investment and private banking. Inflation appears to be a driving impulse, he observes. They want to understand the forces that are driving inflation and figure out how to protect their assets against it.
We see that women investors are more long-term oriented and not as interested in trading, Falkner conveys. They also appear to be particularly interested in material assets such as precious metals.
That fits in well with the investment business that Saxo wants to build up in Switzerland. Although trading remains the online bank’s most important pillar, it is also on the look for revenues from medium- and long-term-oriented investors. Inflation has been a surprising driver in all of that as it attracts a younger – and more female – clientele.
According to Falkner, Saxo Switzerland has been registering twice as many new investment clients as trading clients, with first-quarter 2022 revenues being up 15 percent from a year earlier.
Looking back at 2021, he remembers how almost couldn’t onboard everyone, Falkner indicates. Yet purely from a performance perspective, 2021 was weaker than a year earlier, as the bank reported Wednesday. Net profit fell slightly to 7.7 million Swiss francs ($7.9 million). Operating revenues fell to 22.1 million francs from 25.3 million a year earlier. According to Falkner, that is partly due to the acquisition of Strateo, a domestic competitor.
Saxo has also been drawing younger investors through its white label partnership with robo-advisors such as Selma Finance, Truewealth, and Invoya, which use it as a trading platform, and which are growing strongly. Some are seeing several hundred new clients a month, he says. It also comes after a long dry spell for bot-driven managers in 2019.
This has all led to Switzerland becoming the third best market for the Scandinavian group, according to Falkner. In May, he wants to start testing something Saxo has been doing in Denmark – holding evening investment seminars for women. He wants to hold the first in a flower shop and he already has more than 200 guests signed up. But he himself will not be going, he emphasizes, as the event is women only.