At Austria’s largest bank, the course for the new appointments to the executive floor was set on Wednesday. The current corporate customer board member of Erste Bank Oesterreich was appointed by the supervisory board in an extraordinary meeting to succeed CEO Bernd Spalt, who surprisingly announced a month ago that he would not renew his contract. The 65-year-old is scheduled to take up his new post on July 1. He is also set to take on the role of Chief Retail Officer.
“I am very pleased that in Willi Cernko we have found a customer-oriented, experienced and well-connected CEO for Erste Group,” said the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Erste Group, Friedrich Rödler, according to the broadcast. “I’m taking over the chairmanship of an excellently managed and well-positioned banking group and I’m very happy about this new task,” Cernko is quoted as saying.
Search for a successor under pressure
This step became necessary because the previous CEO, Bernd Spalt, announced in May that he would leave the bank after the end of his contract, which ran until next year.
Spalt’s departure therefore put pressure on the long-time chairman of the supervisory board of Erste Group, Friedrich Rödler. He had to find a successor quickly. In the end, the only question was whether Cernko was more than an interim solution. Because by 2025 at the latest, Peter Bosek could return to Vienna as a new strong man.
Bosek was eliminated (not entirely on good terms) because he was passed over in 2017. Now he is head of Luminor Bank in Estonia. It would be the more future-proof choice for many. Internally, Cernko is not credited with much modernization power, neither in the banking area nor with the current weaknesses in the in-house management.
However, Bosek is not yet available due to his current contract. He is to sell Luminor Bank by 2024 and would be handsomely rewarded by owner Blackstone in the event of a deal. After that he could open again in Vienna.
From Raiffeisen to Bank Austria to Erste Group
So Cernko adds the executive chair of Erste Group to his long list of influential posts in domestic banking. Born in Knittelfeld, he started his career at Raiffeisen. His path then led to the Creditanstalt in Vienna, which thanks to the merger became part of Bank Austria and was then taken over first by HVB and then by UniCredit. Only then did he find his way into the savings bank group.
Cernko moved from the Raiffeisenkasse Obdach-Weißkirchen to the Creditanstalt in 1985, which shaped him so much that 30 years later, when the institute had long since ceased to exist, he pointed out his strong roots in “CA”. In 1998, the Creditanstalt was merged into Bank Austria, where Cernko managed the Eastern European business from April 2002. However, it was only for a year before he was appointed to the Bank Austria Board of Management, where he was responsible for private customer business. In 2006, he also assumed this role at HypoVereinsbank (HVB), shortly before UniCredit took over the helm there.
At the end of 2007, under pressure from the German financial market supervisory authority, he had to decide between the two board positions at the sister banks Bank Austria and HVB – and he went to Munich and gave up the Viennese board job, but remained represented in important UniCredit committees. In Milan he was responsible for the two core markets of Austria and Germany for the private customer division at group level until he returned to Austria in October 2009 as CEO of Bank Austria UniCredit.
He held this position until 2016. When he didn’t leave entirely voluntarily, the media wrote, “in the financial sector it is likely that Cernko does not consider his career to be over.” This assumption quickly proved to be correct. At the beginning of 2017, Cernko became Chief Risk Officer at Erste Group, from July 2019 he was Board Member for Corporate Customers at Erste Bank Oesterreich, and from January 2021 he was also Deputy CEO of Erste Bank. From there he has now reached the highest post in the holding company.