Normally, the stage at the annual annual press conference of the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV) belongs to the president. Although the entire three-member DSGV board usually travels from Berlin to Frankfurt, most questions usually do not revolve around digitization or regulation, but monetary policy (such as criticism of the ECB's years of negative deposit rates), the Landesbanken (how is the plan for a single savings bank central institution progressing?) or how much the branch network of savings banks must be thinned out, to keep costs and revenues in balance. This Tuesday, the questions are likely to be somewhat different for several reasons, and thus a new face could come into view: Karolin Schriever.

Hanno Mußler

Editor in business.

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In her mid-forties, she is an auditor by training. It was not until September 2022 that Schriever moved to the Sparkassenverband after 16 years at the business and consulting company KPMG, including as a partner since October 2017, and also moved privately from Frankfurt to Berlin. She is the first woman on the DSGV board. And despite the short term of office, something like a constant: The current savings bank president Helmut Schleweis will retire at the end of 2023, his successor Ulrich Reuter has now been elected, but not yet in office. Schriever could fill a vacuum here.

Expert for balancing sustainability

Above all, the topicality makes Schriever a particularly sought-after conversation partner. As an expert in sustainability and regulation, she wants to encourage savings banks to finance even more "green" investments with loans. And bank supervisors should, in their view, pay more attention to the transformation of loans. After all, the impact of even a small investment in a company that does not yet produce in a particularly climate-neutral manner can be much greater than a large loan to an already quite "green" company. Schriever does not see this fact sufficiently taken into account in the capital requirements for banks and savings banks. She would also like to see more transparency so that the customers of the savings banks can better recognise their contribution to the green transformation.

Presumably, however, not even the climate finance issues, which are very relevant in the medium term, will be in the foreground on Tuesday, but on the risk management of the savings banks. After the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in the US, some observers see similarities with the savings banks. Similar to Silicon Valley Bank, savings banks and cooperative banks in Germany have been showered with their customers' savings deposits during the pandemic. By contrast, demand for credit was moderate.

Many savings banks – similar to Silicon Valley Bank – also put the surplus money into low-interest securities, whose prices on the stock market lost value enormously and quickly with the abrupt rise in interest rates in 2022. Schleweis has already announced – apparently intended to reassure – that the bonds in its own portfolio have brought losses of less than 370 billion euros to the 10 municipally supported savings banks. But even a high single-digit billion figure is not a piece of cake for the savings banks: Many of them have had to liquidate reserves in order to be able to bear the losses. In the cumulative figures of the association, one or the other individual fate is also lost. Schriever will also have to explain how these bond losses are only temporary.