After a year of planning, Nordea has confirmed that its headquarters will be in Finland rather than Sweden from the start of October.
More than anything else, the bank appears stoked about the prospect of joining a bloc of countries whose financial sectors are supervised with reference to a single rulebook.
“Domiciling in a country that is participating in the Banking Union is the best way to secure a fair, stable and predictable regulatory environment for Nordea on a par with its peers,” it said in a statement this week.
But Nordea may be over-egging the extent to which EU banks come under the same regulatory umbrella.
In the next few months member states will be working frantically to put new measures in place, with the aim of “completing” the Banking Union.
The chief task is to come up with a common system of deposit insurance, whereby an EU-wide fund would be used to protect the cash of depositors across the bloc.
Nordea’s move into Finland clearly illustrates the deficiencies of the system that is in place in Europe at the moment.
It will be Finnish resources that are on the hook should anything bad happen to Nordea, even though the bank’s total assets of $670bn compares with a GDP of just over $250bn in Finland last year.
Nordea can extol the virtues of operating in a stable and predictable regulatory environment, but a huge amount of work still needs to be done before anyone can talk about a Banking Union that holds together in the bad times as well as the good.