The decline of the traditional ship-lending presence in New York continues with one European bank shutting up shop altogether and another trimming staff in recent weeks.
DVB Bank quietly closed the commercial activities at its Big Apple office at year’s end after efforts by its parent, DZ Bank, to sell the ship-lending business failed.
Earlier this month, Nordea Bank made two senior staff redundant from Martin Lunder's New York office amid a general belt-tightening initiative.
However, Lunder stressed that Nordea has no plans to step away from shipping.
Cost-cutting focus
“This was part of a general cost-cutting focus within Nordea,” Lunder said in a recent interview.
“Our commitment and strategy has not changed when it comes to shipping. However, the cost focus is intense. There was a review of the structure of various groups, and it was determined that we should increase the number of clients per executive in the New York office.”
Nordea’s New York team was cut from seven to five. Lunder is managing director and head of shipping, offshore and oil services for the Americas.
TradeWinds understands one of the casualties was Henning Christiansen, a nine-year veteran of the New York office who had duties as a loan officer and on the investment banking side.
There was a review of the structure of various groups, and it was determined that we should increase the number of clients per executive in the New York office
Martin Lunder
Lunder described the departures as “two senior client executives working for me for a long time … both valuable contributors”.
The effective closure of the DVB office — with only a few administrative staff retained after 1 January — was not announced but long assumed to be coming by finance insiders.
DZ Bank essentially determined it could not sell off the shipping portfolio without accepting a stiff discount, which it did not wish to do, according to a source familiar with the rationale.
DZ has had better luck selling other parts of DVB’s troubled transport finance portfolio. For example, it sold DVB’s $6.4bn aviation finance portfolio to Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group last year.
New lending halted
Instead of the shipping portfolio sale, the bank determined to stop doing new shipping lending last spring with a few exceptions for “rollovers” of existing loans.
The bank is essentially winding down the business as loans are paid down.
“Existing clients were essentially told you can stay as long as you like, we’re not going to push you out,” the source said. “It’s a very honourable approach.”
New York had never been a “booking” office for DVB shipping loans, one banker explained.
“The bankers in New York were only the wining and dining guys, with all the decisions made and the business booked in Europe,” he said.
“That made New York easy to say goodbye to. You don’t need the commercial people when you’re not doing new loans, and they cost the most. The writing was on the wall for some time.”
Some of the last DVB bankers in New York included Jurek Bochner, who retired in 2018; Christiane Lombardi, who has joined Evan Cohen’s ship-lending team at New York’s CIT Bank in November; Christoph Clauss, who joined MT Maritime Management in Connecticut as chief financial officer in November; and Martijn van Tuyl, who is currently listed as self-employed.
While the two banks' situations are different, they do little to reverse a sombre trend in a city that was once one of shipping’s lending capitals.
“You have banks’ risk appetites decreasing, advance ratios declining, a lot of regulatory requirements and pretty much the banks all going after the same clients,” one lender said.
“That’s true globally, but in New York you only have so much business going around. The ownership ranks are not that deep and not that wide. There are only so many clients you can bank.”
