General meeting in Finansforbundet i Danske Bank

At Finansforbundet in Danske Bank, we work on the following core task:

To create a foundation that enables all members of Finansforbundet in Danske Bank to succeed in their working lives.

The core task is divided into four sub-items within:

Well-being

Competence

Organisation

Relevance

Until the general meeting, our office consisted of 10 district board members and 5 secretariat members.

In connection with the general meeting, the number of district board members is changed from 10 to 8.

In the same way, it is agreed to hire an additional person to the secretariat, which will in future consist of six persons.

The Secretariat performs tasks such as:

Legal sparring and advice for members and union representatives
Political advice to the district board members

Communication advice and production of content for website and newsletters

Administrative tasks

The work of both the district board and the secretariat is widely branched into both the bank and Finansforbundet centrally.

We also work closely with you union representatives because of our contact structure, and we are briefed on the matters in all business areas of Danske Bank.

Our work at Finansforbundet i Danske Bank speaks in the retention of members by creating value for the individual member and being able to offer competent and relevant advice through a thorough knowledge of the bank's affairs.

In addition, we also put many resources into becoming more members of Finansforbundet in Danske Bank.

Our work is systematically built up. We are contacting all new employees of Danske Bank to join Finansforbundet. We also concentrate on specific business areas during certain periods, as well as using our employee events and Christmas quiz as a catalyst for our work.

We closely monitor the development of our *organisation percentage and fortunately the development is moving in the right direction. We began analysing the figures in detail in November 22.

Our organisation percentage over time:

November 2022: 63.5 %
November 2023: 65.3 %
November 2024: 66.3 %
April 1st 2025: 66.7%

(*Organisation percentage: The share of the employees of Danske Bank employed in Denmark who are members of Finansforbundet i Danske Bank).

We have negotiated two company collective agreements with Danske Bank since the last general meeting.

We are very pleased with the outcome of the two agreements.

We know that many people focus on salary developments. That is why we are also pleased that we have managed to improve real salary during this period.

However, we also focus on elements other than salary. In particular, in connection with OK25 we have focused on ’Plads til det hele liv’ in Danish. The result is a number of improvements to different life situations. Overall, this brings a number of positive changes to the employment conditions, which we hope you and the members will use in future.

One thing is what we achieve in a negotiation. Another thing is the deterioration we are preventing. Just as we have a number of requirements and want to negotiate, the bank has of course also prepared itself.

That is why what we as a union have maintained or avoided is just as important. We probably do not reveal too much by saying that Danske Bank would like to increase job-based salary and that a larger part of the total salary pool must be allocated to individual salary.

During both negotiations, we have found that the bank has entered into negotiations with an open mindset and a real desire to improve the situation as an employee of Danske Bank. The climate in the negotiating room and the tone when we talk has been characterised by mutual respect and an understanding of the roles we each bring into the room.

Of course, there are also areas where we do not look the same and where it became intense. For example when it comes to the conditions of employees on an individual contract.

We had a deep desire to include matters for employees on individual contracts in the company collective negotiations. But it was rejected by the bank on the basis of the argument that these factors must be agreed individually and not collectively.

We do not agree with that. We know that around 20% of Danske Bank employees are employed on an individual contract. We therefore also believe that the conditions for that group must be entered into the collective agreement table and negotiated collectively. The bank takes a different view.

Once the frustrations about the bank's attitude have disappeared, we are better geared to helping and advising employees on individual contracts at a completely different and more professional level than it was in 2022 – today we are better geared to helping and advising this group of members.

We will continue to prioritise our day-to-day work of advising members on individual contracts, while trying to persuade the bank to enter into a dialogue about collective agreements for the employee group.

Area union representatives

Three times a year, we gather our area union representatives to attend the OTR meeting. Here we share knowledge across the organisation, and the OTR are being prepared for their OTR tasks.

The OTR meetings are a good platform for us at Finansforbundet in Danske Bank in relation to being able to inform the OTR and thus to the TR about our work at Finansforbundet in Danske Bank.

It is also at the OTR meetings, we get feedback on the work we do, and we engage in dialogues about what we should work for and where we can optimise our work and collaborate with each other.

It is also from the OTR’s that we will get delegates to the National Meeting of Finansforbundet, which takes place every three years. 

Union representatives

Our contact structure, where all union representatives have two contact persons in the district board, ensures that we have regular contact with all union representatives.

Through this, we are also up to date on any local challenges such as work pressure, well-being or stress, and can bring them to a higher level at HR or the top management level.

In addition, we collect all TR’s physically several times a year.

The highlight of the year is the TR seminar, where we gather for knowledge sharing and networking over two days. At the TR seminar, we also aim to equip you TR’s (even better) to handle the challenges and often complex issues you face in your daily life.

The TR’s are our extended arm locally and without you – no Finansforbundet in Danske Bank. Therefore, we also give the TR seminar a high priority when planning our annual cycle of work. We hope you are pleased with the TR seminar. The evaluations from the last three years of TR seminars could indicate this, because they are very good.

Another event is the annual discussion with the ELT, arranging an open meeting between union representatives and the top management of Danske Bank.

It is an event that we know that many of our colleagues in other banks envy us, and they do it for good reason.

It gives union representatives an opportunity to face-to-face opinions and solutions to challenges.

For example, we have managed to use debate with the ELT as a starting point for a meeting with Frans Woelders and selected TR about the challenges that we see in his business area.

Furthermore, we also experience that Carsten Egeriis recognises the great accounts and facilities of TR as an important catalyst in the progress of Danske Bank. Statements from his mouth, which first came after discussions with the ELT in 2024.

All new union representatives elected at the TR election every three years are invited to our day for the new TR’s. It’s always very refreshing to meet new TR’s and feel the fighting spirit and dynamism they take on the TR role with

Welcome to all of you!

We send newsletters to all members of Finansforbundet in Danske Bank at a fixed frequency. The newsletters include information, knowledge, tools and guides – all things about being employed at Danske Bank.

We also enjoy coming out and meeting the Members where they have their daily lives. Every year we arrange member meetings, and this gives us a welcome opportunity to get close to the members.

It is actually more correct to call them employee events because non-members are generally also able to participate in the event of a call later to talk about membership of Finansforbundet I Danske Bank.

The background to the meetings is a professional presentation with an external speaker, who gives the members knowledge and creates value for their membership.

But for us it is just as important to meet the members during breaks at the coffee machine to hear what is happening locally.

During the period, we held a number of webinars and physical member meetings in Aalborg, Aarhus, Odense and Copenhagen and we were in contact with several thousand members either virtually or in person.

The topics have spanned a wide range, and we have come up with:

Generative AI
How to prepare for your retirement
What can you learn from your younger (or older) colleagues
I wish my boss was chief
Misinformation: How to see scams with numbers
Common song
Agile issues based on a comic book

We believe that a good and fruitful collaboration with Danske Bank at the top level is the way to create better pay and employment conditions for our employees. We see this cooperation in all our areas of business and that Danske Bank employees and managers to a large extent are in a cooperative relationship rather than opposed to opponents.

We also find that senior management is more open and the employees are closer to their local management in Danske Bank compared to other banks.

We also believe that we as employees have good opportunities to gain qualified qualifications in areas such as Gen AI and in-service training in general as well as a greater flexibility to work from home today – unlike, for example, Nykredit, who has just introduced maximum one home working day per week and control of this at individual level.

When we last had the general meeting in 2022, it was during a period of distrust in the bank. A number of cases that left the bank with a bad reputation were fresh in memory, and Carsten Egeriis was relatively new as CEO.

When Egeriis took up office, we had already established a strong relationship with the CEO position in Danske Bank. Our relationship has been further developed and we have continuously reminded top management to be open about decisions and to give even greater priority to Town Hall meetings and other reasons to signal openness to employees.

Our own Q&A sessions with Carsten Egeriis also speak into that agenda.

For the annual Q&A session, employees send questions in advance.

Finansforbundet in Danske Bank selects questions and on which topics 👉

Kirsten Ebbe Brich, Chairman of Finansforbundet in Danske Bank, asks the questions 👉

Carsten Egeriis answers the questions 👉.

The annual Q&A session is a good opportunity for us to be visible to both members and potential members.

It is possible to attend the auditorium in Copenhagen Central or virtually – and the connection is large. Approximately 1800 have participated in each session.

We prioritise being present in all fora and committees we can be available in the bank. If there are specific challenges locally, we set up meetings with the management teams of the various business areas.

This has happened in PC, for example, where we have held regular meetings with Mark Wraa-Hansen over the past year to address the challenges facing those areas of the bank.

Regular meetings at the premises of Danske Bank where one or more district board members are represented include:

SU
European works Council
Regular monthly meetings with HR Legal
Committee on competence
Pension committee

Danske Bank has worked with preparing to implement the EU’'s remuneration transparency Directive – and this is a work that we comply intensely. It concerns an area that we and our members are passionate about:

Equal pay for men and women and transparency in pay grading.

We do not expect the new EU pay directive will fix all the inequalities and injustices experienced by our members. But we hope that it will increase transparency for us and for each member and will give us an insight into the situation of equal pay between men and women, which we have repeatedly called for.

Another initiative from the EU  is the sustainability reporting directive, also known as CSRD. The intention is a focus on sustainability in businesses that we support.

We have a special focus on the part of CSRD that is about “own workforce” and how employees can organise themselves and how we are heard.

We aim for that Finansforbundet in Danske and Finansforbundet centrally to be more  relevant to our international colleagues. And fortunately, there is much to indicate that we succeed.

We prioritise communicating in English and organising relevant events in English. And we receive a lot of registrations and enquiries from international colleagues.

We do not have data on the nationality of our members, but when we look at the number of members who have chosen English as their language preference, we can see that the number has doubled in two years - from November 2022 to November 2024, and in November 2024 over 6 percent of our members had English as their primary language preference.

The TR election this year also showed that internationalisation has gone beyond the membership base. We had three candidates with an international background and two of them obtained elections.

International in Finance is a great example of a network with which we share interests and therefore have a lot of cooperation

This gives a huge value in terms of reaching a target group, which otherwise may be a little more difficult to reach in order to gain a better understanding of the wishes and needs of this group and develop the right efforts.

During the past period, we have pursued this kind of collaboration with some of the many networks in existence at Danske Bank. For example

✅ Young minds@Danske, with whom we have collaborated in connection with the TR election and with which Finansforbundet has collaborated on events  –

✅ Danske stress Network – we have collaborated with in relation to communication about network offers

✅ Danske babies we have been the link between Financial Services Union Denmark and the network for colleagues on parental leave

✅ expats & friends – network for all the Bank's international colleagues, and those who want to get to know them.

We see great value in working with networks at Danske Bank, and we will continue to prioritise this during the coming general meeting period.