Risto Tornivaara, CEO of Danske Bank, receives award as the ‘Most Reliable CEO 2016’

26.1.2017

Risto Tornivaara, the CEO of Danske Bank since 2013, has received an award from the Nordic Institute of Business & Society (NIBS) recognizing him as the Most Reliable CEO in Finland.

risto-tornivaaraThe award is granted every two years and the recipient is a CEO whose leadership of a major Finnish corporation has produced the strongest and most stable profitable growth.

The name of the award refers to the CEO's reliability in generating stable, steadily rising profits. In other words, the financial results of the company led by the winning CEO have been growing relatively strongly and, most of all, predictably and steadily, say the founding members of NIBS, Professor Jaakko Aspara from Hanken, Swedish School of Economics, and Professor of Practice Pekka Mattila from Aalto University.

The recipient of the Most Reliable CEO award is sought by analyzing the key figures of Finlands 250 largest firms. The indicator used as a basis for the award calculates the average annual growth rate of the company's net profit over the last four years (2012–2015), adjusted by any fluctuations in the growth rate.

The recipient of the 2016 award, Danske Banks Risto Tornivaara, has been acting as the CEO of the bank's Finnish branch since 2013. Before then he worked as the Deputy CEO and as the manager of various business areas in the company. During Tornivaara's term as CEO, Danske Banks net profit has been growing steadily, with no major decreases.

Tornivaara commented on this recognition of his work as follows: Over the last few years, we have made consistent efforts to build an increasingly customer-oriented, more streamlined and more efficient Danske Bank. We also aim to continuously improve the bank's financial performance. It is great that this work can be seen in the form of steady growth in customer satisfaction and our improved financial performance. This award is also a recognition of the whole organization for a job well done over the long term.

Sectoral cycles and circumstances can often lead to fluctuating performances among major corporations from year to year; the Most Reliable CEO award seeks to recognize a more consistent upward trajectory in financial performance over a period of years, says the third founding member of NIBS, Professor Henrikki Tikkanen of Aalto University.

NIBS is granting the award for the second time this year, in collaboration with Aalto University Executive Education. The recipient of the previous award, made in 2014, was Pekka Laaksonen, CEO of Valio. The next award will be granted in December 2018.

For further information, please contact:

Pekka Mattila
Professor of Practice
pekka.mattila@aaltoee.fi; +358 40 738 7221

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Nordic Institute of Business & Society NIBS

The Nordic Institute of Business & Society (NIBS) is an applied research institute and think tank, whose mission is to promote the sustainable transformation of people, organizations, business sectors and society as a whole, by identifying the challenges and opportunities to be found in established business models. www.nibs.fi

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