Type Public-law institution Website www.nordlb.com Total assets 181 billion EUR (2015) | Industry Banking Number of employees 6,343 (2015) Founded 1 July 1970 | |
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Key people Thomas Bürkle (CEO)Peter-Jürgen Schneider (Pres. of supervisory board) CEO Gunter Dunkel (1 Jan 2009–) Profiles | ||
The Norddeutsche Landesbank Girozentrale (abbreviated NORD/LB) is a German Landesbank and one of the largest commercial banks in Germany. It is a public corporation owned by the federal states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt with its head office in Hanover and branches in Braunschweig and Magdeburg.
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Business
NORD/LB was established in 1765 as Braunschweigische Staatsbank. The main areas of specialization of NORD/LB are investment banking, agricultural and real estate banking, corporate finance, ship and aircraft financing and private banking. NordLB maintains branch offices in all major financial and trading centers, including London, Singapore and New York City.
NORD/LB is Germany's largest bank for national and international bond issues.
Art collection
In 1985 NORD/LB started to build up an art collection with the aim of representing post-1945 modern art in an international context. The collection today comprises about 3,000 artworks, still with an emphasis on postwar art, including Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sol LeWitt, Jeff Koons, Jannis Kounellis and Jörg Immendorff, among others. Employees can use the works to decorate the buildings, and they are displayed within the bank's own exhibition program. In 1999 it was able to open the exhibition space of its own.
In 2009, NORD/LB returned Franz Marc's Cat Behind a Tree (1910), a painting the bank had bought in 1983, to the descendant of a Jewish shoe-manufacturing family persecuted by the Nazis; the bank had loaned the painting long-term to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. In 2012, the bank sold its Jeff Koons sculpture, Tulips (1995-2004), from the “Celebration” series. The bank will use the proceeds to set up a foundation to promote contemporary art and cultural projects in northern Germany.