Snorre Storset, who oversees Nordea’s EUR 315b wealth and asset management unit from Oslo, said a “temporary hiring freeze” affecting Nordea “will include wealth.” Until now, the wealth operations had been shielded from the reductions hitting the rest of the organization, and Storset declared as recently as late October that he was hiring.

That’s because Scandinavia is home to “the fastest growing private banking markets in Europe,” he said at the time. Now, Storset says there’s no scope to look at external candidates.