Major UK lender Bank of Scotland has opened a new office in Sweden designed to promote and expand the bank's Scandinavian business, the Scotsman has reported.
The new facility, Bank of Scotland’s first in Scandinavia, is located in the heart of Stockholm’s financial district. The office will initially employ six staff to support the UK lender’s Nordic corporate financing business. The bank expects to increase this number to 30 as it grows its local portfolio.
The Scottish bank will offer a full range of corporate banking services, including the key areas of structured finance and real estate finance, from its new facility, which it forecasts will support a sixfold growth in its Scandinavian loans book.
This is a very buoyant marketplace. We had begun to see an uptick in activity in the region, and so the natural move was a permanent presence on the ground, Andrew Darling, Bank of Scotland’s managing director of corporate banking Europe, commented.