Differing levels of efficiency
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| Turning and turning in the widening gyre |
THOMAS FISCHER DID not have the immediate future of his own bank in mind when he began throwing impromptu snippets from The Second Coming into an interview with Euromoney in 2005. But the former CEO of WestLB, as much an aficionado of WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas as of extravagant pinstripe suits and large cigars, could scarcely have chosen a more appropriate way of foretelling his own demise. For Europe’s largest economy, the recent upheavals at WestLB and a handful of other German banks might turn out to be precisely what was needed to accelerate change in the country’s hopelessly outdated and inefficient banking industry. But for WestLB, as well as for Fischer and a number of his erstwhile colleagues, things have indeed fallen apart spectacularly in recent months. Nobody imagined it was going to be easy for one of Germany’s most colourful bankers when he was appointed chairman of WestLB’s management board in October 2003, or for the bank’s new chief risk officer, Matthijs van den Adel, whose appointment was announced on the same day.