• Investors still trust ‘Europe’s safest bank’
• Swedish ‘Taliban’ bank takes wisdom from H&M;

Bloomberg said Sweden’s state-backed mortgage lender SBAB wants to take retail customers from the nation’s biggest banks as it targets as much as $14 billion in deposits.

“We will think as normal retailers,” Chief Executive Officer Carl-Viggo Östlund said in an interview. A bank should be able to “become a much-appreciated company” in people’s perceptions, in the same way Ikea is, he said. “There is a systematic fault in Sweden’s banking system that we will attack, and that starts with the customer.”

He is not the only Swedish banker taking lessons from the retail sector. Pär Boman, CEO of Handelsbanken has said the bank’s expansion model is modelled in part on how retailers such as Ikea and Hennes & Mauritz – often compared to Handelsbanken for their long-term focus – have grown so fast.

“We really, really try to develop our business model and so on. But at the end of the day, all this work boils down to when the customer meets the bank: on the phone, on the web, on the smartphone, on the app or in the branch”, he said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Handelsbanken, sometimes nicknamed “the Taliban” for its fundamentalist approach to banking, is being hailed by investors, regulators and central bank executives all over the world. After standing stable during the financial crisis, not excepting state support money and still giving top returns, the Stockholm based bank has became the most studied lenders in recent years.