October 22, 2014 - Nordea Bank is to take a EUR344 million impairment charge on its current IT systems as it embarks on a major project to rip and replace its core banking and payments platforms.

The Stockholm-based bank outlined its plans to boost IT spending by 30-35% over the next four-to-five years during its third quarter results presentation.

Nordea CEO Christian Clausen, says: "To enable us to develop even more personalised and convenient services to our customers in the future we are currently simplifying processes in all parts of the bank. We will, as part of this process, build new core banking and payment platforms, significantly increasing our agility, scale benefit and resilience."

He says ongoing investment in digital is already reaping rewards, as customers interacted with the bank from remote devices more than 157 million times in the third quarter. At the same time, the number of branch transactions declined by four million over the course of the past year, with a 20% decrease in manual transactions year-on-year.

Over 40% of customer-to-bank contact now takes place through the mobile channel, says Clausen, with 1000 new customers a day signing up for mobile access during the quarter.

Details of the five-year IT investment plan are scant, but the bank says it intends to move all accounts across to a new core platform, consolidate its existing data warehouses and implement a unified payments hub capable of handling domestic, international and Sepa payments.