The Apotheker- und Ärztebank has reorganized parts of its supervisory board. Two banking experts move into the control committee.
(Photo: picture alliance / picture agency-o)
Frankfurt Dentist official Karl-Georg Pochhammer is the new chairman of the supervisory board of the Apotheker- und Ärztebank (Apobank). This was announced by the money house on Friday evening. Three posts in the control committee were determined on Friday by the Apobank representative assembly. With a balance sheet total of 67 billion euros, Apobank is the second largest cooperative bank in Germany.
New members of the control committee are Gerhard Hofmann, who was on the board of the BVR cooperative association for a long time, and the former Apobank finance director Thomas Siekmann. Susanne Wegner, Managing Director of the management company Deutsche Apotheke, was re-elected. The previous chairman of the supervisory board, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, was not proposed again. The World Medical President had headed the control panel since 2017.
Instead, the doctors suggested Hofmann, the regulatory expert was also under discussion as chairman of the supervisory board. But this year, the dentists had the right to propose the post. Pochhammer is Deputy Chairman of the Board of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Dentists and has been a member of the Apobank Supervisory Board for ten years.
Traditionally, Apobank is regulated in such a way that representatives of pharmacists, doctors and dentists have equal rights on the supervisory board. However, the banking supervisory authority of the European Central Bank (ECB) recently took a critical view of the fact that the owners of Apobank fill most of the positions on the supervisory body with representatives of the pharmacist and doctor lobby and hardly any with bank experts and IT specialists.
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With Hofmann and Siekmann, two banking experts are now moving up – although Siekmann only left the board a year ago.
Failed IT conversion has caused unrest
In the past two years there has been a great deal of unrest at Apobank. The new head of the bank, Matthias Schellenberg, has only been in office since March. He succeeded Ulrich Sommer, who abruptly left at the end of 2021. Siekmann and private customer board member Olaf Klose had previously left the bank.
Apobank had to take a lot of criticism because of the troubled start of its IT conversion almost two years ago. The switch to the new IT service provider Avaloq from Pentecost 2020 initially failed in parts. In the course of the migration, among other things, transfers and other simple banking services did not run smoothly.
Customers reacted angrily, some turned their backs on Apobank. In 2021, the number of members fell slightly to just over 115,000 – the first decline in ten years. In addition, the money house is struggling with high costs.
The proposal by several prominent medical professionals to set a quota for women on the Apobank supervisory board did not find the necessary majority on Friday. They wanted to achieve a proportion of women of at least 30 percent.
A total of ten seats on the control body are elected by the owners. Only one of these ten posts has a woman. This is surprising in view of the fact that there have long been as many women doctors as there are doctors. Business start-ups have long come mostly from female doctors and pharmacists.
The Representatives’ Assembly merely decided to suggest that the election proposals of the members for the election committee and the selection from the members for the election lists for the candidates for the Representatives’ Assembly should each be filled equally. So far, the meeting of representatives, which represents the members and thus the owners of Apobank, has also been dominated by men.
More: Prominent physicians call for a minimum number of women on the Apobank board of directors