The reputation of the handshake has suffered badly in the past year and a half. Have you even forgotten how to do it? Two men in dark suits seem to want to convince themselves of the opposite on this gloomy Thursday in the Haus der Bayerischen Wirtschaft. For a long time – a little too long – they stand there in the foyer with crossed fingers and outstretched arms, look deep into each other’s eyes and give each other a little support. At the 15th Bavarian Finance Summit, to which the SZ invited, this seems to be more necessary than ever. “Corona has put society and the entire industry to the test,” says Ulrike Wolf in her opening speech. The ministerial director of the Ministry of Economic Affairs stepped in for her boss Hubert Aiwanger at short notice.
But even without the Bavarian Minister of Economic Affairs, things are more relaxed from the start than the motto of the event “What’s next? Why the financial sector has to reinvent itself” would have suggested. For the time of the corona pandemic, the representatives of the banking and insurance industry present gave their companies a good report through the bank. You see yourself well equipped for the future. Barbara Karuth-Cell from the Allianz Board of Management names the two crucial topics in the first interview: digitization and sustainability. But she also says: “We have to accelerate the transformation even more than we have done so far.”
This has already worked well with a new system that is to be used in Africa and that employees worked out purely digitally in just eight months during the pandemic. “With a global team that has never met, that has never met,” says Karuth-Zell. The manager is not alone with the view that things have gone quite well so far. The Vice President of the German Federal Bank Claudia Maria Buch believes she knows why: “The real economic crisis did not take place in the banking and financial sector like this.”
Hundreds of small and medium-sized companies disappeared from the market during the Corona period or had to be kept alive with bridging aids, while the large banks and insurance companies only have to send their employees to the home office and have no problems at all with a global crisis – is is it really that easy?
If you can believe the participants in the first discussion round of the day, yes – at least if you have been pushing digitization for a long time. “Even before the pandemic, we had 75 percent of our employees in the home office two days a week,” says Alexander Vollert. The productivity remained the same during Corona, the sickness rate even decreased. Just like the CEO of Axa, his colleague Doris Höpke from Munich Re also sees the pandemic as a magnifying glass for digitization – and an opportunity. “Over time, the realization grew that much more is possible in the digital world than you previously thought.” Ingrid Hengster, member of the board of directors of KfW, speaks effusively of the fact that the infrastructure that had previously been built up could have been “excellent”. The digital organization was new territory on this scale, but it worked “perfectly”. With all the exuberance, it would have been very interesting to hear how a simple employee without an extra office in her own four walls and with two children who had to be looked after with homework at the same time would describe her experiences of the past months.
“There will be no more permanent jobs.”
And there is one more point in the industry that everyone agrees: At least for a few days a week, employees should definitely return to the offices in the future. “Wherever friction and exchange are simply necessary, personal interaction is necessary, and we have also sharpened awareness of this,” explains Doris Höpke. Ingrid Hengster from Allianz believes that work also depends on seeing each other and exchanging ideas on site. She can well imagine what a modern office could look like: “There will be no more fixed workplaces. You register in the morning and are allocated a place.” In this case, the economic advantage for the company would be obvious – how well that would be received by the employees is another matter.
In the further discussions of the financial summit, too, optimism clearly prevails; this applies to coping with the corona pandemic as well as to looking to the future. A hard inventory of the current situation and the question of where the business problems of insurance companies and banks lie were once not an issue on that day. The economics professor Claudia Buch from the Bundesbank pointed out at the very beginning: The next crisis is coming, the only question is when, where and how.