Pernille Sahl Taylor

…part of the leadership team at Handelsbanken in the UK and so central to a remarkable, very unusual way of running and bank (or any business). They give as much control as they can to people working in their customer-facing branches, indeed they encourage and expect people across the bank to make decisions in their area of expertise. The branch teams make decisions about who to lend to and what to charge, working to do the right thing for customers and the prudent thing for the bank and free to work out what that means, responsible for the relationship in the long term. They don’t have sales or product targets and the business has one overall financial outcome they aim for – higher profitability than the average of peer competitors, something that can go up and down year to year, not just up, and something achieved by having more satisfied customers and lower costs than competitors. Simple. But very unusual.