WALLENBERG FAMILY

In the mid-19th century, a 30-year-old Swedish young man, called Andrè Oscar Wallenberg, travels to the US. He is the son of a bishop from Linkoping, an old medieval town south of Stockholm. He has two brothers and for each of them their father gave a name with a meaning from ancient Greek: the oldest Marcus Hilarion (the happy one), the middle one Jacob Agathon (the good) and the youngest André (from Andreios, the powerful) Oscar. But most of all, the bishop's prediction seems to have been true about André Oscar, for he became the most prominent of the brothers. Andrè has a strong faith, but it’s in finance not in Christianity: he wants to be a banker. The trip proves to be very inspirational indeed. In 1837, when in the US, he witnessed the so-called Panic of 37, a terrible financial crisis: it was when he "learned how banks should not be run". In 1856, some 20 years later, at the age of 50, he founded Enskilda Bank. The bank quickly became one of the most powerful financial institutions in Sweden and played a crucial role in the development of the country's economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: Wallenberg arranged bond loans of over 80 million SEK (billions of today euros) to the Government, municipalities, industry and railways. He also became a pioneer in modern banking: just one year after opening, the bank claimed to be the first one in the world to employ a woman. Thirty years later Enskilda introduced pension schemes for employees. When Oscar died, the bank’s chairperson role passed to Knut Agathon, Oscar’s son, whose name continued the family tradition of well-wishing Greek names: banking helped the Wallenberg family build a unique position in Swedish business. Some shadows appeared as well: during World War II, the family was accused of collaborating with Nazi Germany and thus U.S. Government put the bank on a Black List. The incident was nothing compared to the tragedy that was awaiting the family decades later. In 1972, the bank merged with Skandinaviska Banken to become Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken, or SEB, which is the name the bank still trades today. The new bank had at the time almost 7000 employees, 393 branches, a well-established customer base and good relationships with many of Sweden's biggest companies. It was not an easy step.

Officially, the merger was done to make the bank more competitive in the international markets. However, the main reason was political: At the time, Sweden was run by a very left-orientated social democratic party which forced restrictions on banks and private companies. Only a certain level of profit was allowed, and when Stockholm’s Enskilda Bank tried to expand, this action was held back by the Swedish government. The merger was, therefore, just a trick to bypass the law and create room for more profits. There were some problems, too: Skandinaviska Banken was about three times bigger than Enskilda Bank. With such a controversial deal, for the first time in the dynasty’s history, the Wallenberg were divided as to whether the merger should take place: chairman Marcus Wallenberg Junior was pushing for the deal, whereas the former chairman Jacob Wallenberg, son of Knut, strongly opposed the deal. The rift between family members turned into tragedy when, in November 1971, the bank’s CEO, Marc Wallenberg, one of the top negotiators of the merger, committed suicide, leaving the Wallenberg family without a natural successor in the banking business.  The bank survived this family crisis, became one of the largest banks in Sweden and until very recently proved to still be a forward-looking business: 10 years ago, SEB sold its retail banking operations in Ukraine to Eurobank Group. As the Ukrainian War exploded in 2022, with many European companies stuck with losses for millions, exiting the country years before was the best decision ever.

How do you keep a family-focused for generations? First, you keep them well-educated. Several members of the Wallenberg family have attended prestigious universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford. Second, you keep family affairs very secret. Stockholm’s archipelago is 60 km wide and counts some 24,000 islands, ten times the number of Greek islands. The family has been known to hold secretive meetings at a private estate on the island of Varmdo which is not so secluded, being the largest island of the archipelago, where also the tennis star Björn Borg built his villa, but it is also so large everybody can easily hide. The “Nazi Affair” was probably also the reason for another family tragedy, involving Wallenberg’s most famous member: Raoul Wallenberg started a diplomatic career credited with saving the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II. Wallenberg's heroic actions earned him international recognition and praise, but he disappeared in 1945 and is believed to have been killed by the Soviet Union. Russians were the fiercest German enemies, so they may have wanted to “punish” a family linked to the Nazi. At the same time, his effort to save Jews from Holocaust could be read as a way to mitigate the family’s blame. In 2015, it was revealed that another family member, Jacob Wallenberg, had been a target of espionage by Russia's FSB, the former KGB.