settles down after years of expansion, and also defends itself
against the credit crisis, Fred
Crawley catches up with Michael Hackl, the man in charge of
its back-office operations.
territory as Raiffeisen-Leasing International (RLI), which opened
for business in its 17th national market, Kosovo, in the concluding
weeks of 2008.
The holding company for the Raiffeisen Banking Group’s Eastern
leasing operations, RLI has relentlessly broken new ground east of
Austria, while sister holding company Raiffeisen-Leasing has tended
to the domestic market, and to operations in Western and Northern
Europe.
As RLI has rumbled across the
continent, however, its 17 subsidiaries and 1,600 employees have
been steered by a staff of only 12 at headquarters in Vienna.
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Michael Hackl, one of RLI’s three
managing directors, is there when I speak to him. Much of his vast
region of business is blanketed not only by February snow, but by a
deeply quiet economic climate that seems much less likely to thaw
in the spring.
“It is rather clear 2009 will be
very different,” says Hackl. “This year will not be a year of
growth. It will be a year to consolidate what we have.”
No new national
divisions
Furthermore, Hackl explains, once
the operation in Kosovo is established, there are no immediate
plans to open up new national business divisions.
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By GlobalDataFor RLI, this is a first. The
company’s practice has been defined by constant accumulation of
resources, with every year end bringing increased business volume
and profit figures to match increasing coverage of the Eurasian
landmass. This has been the case since the early 1990s, when
several of the large Austrian banks, including the Raiffeisen
group, spread their operations to neighbouring Czech, Slovakian and
Hungarian markets.
At the time, Hackl was working at
Bank Austria, a bank formed in 1991 from the merger of
Zentralsparkasse, Kommerzialbank and Oesterreichische Laenderbank.
For the time being, his work was only concerned with domestic
banking.
Things changed drastically in 2000,
however, with Bank Austria’s buyout of Creditanstalt, the country’s
second largest bank. Hackl had been working as manager of Bank
Austria Leasing since 1996, and so ended up with a surprising new
acquisition.
“We came into possession of
Creditanstalt’s entire leasing network, which included some of the
same countries that RLI now operates in,” says Hackl.
The Creditanstalt leasing network
fell into Bank Austria’s hands just as it was pushing into the
relatively unexplored markets of South East Europe, meaning Hackl
was heavily involved in the establishment of the company’s
Romanian, Bulgarian, Bosnian and Serbian operations.
He soon got a chance to hone his
knowledge of CEE leasing on a more intimate basis, however, with
2005 bringing a move to the position of CEO at Slovakian CAC
Leasing.
It was in late 2005 that Hackl,
noted for his track record in controlling reports and data from a
wide range of local frameworks, was taken on as a managing director
by RLI to support its ever-accelerating growth. Kazakhstan had been
claimed in February, and a campaign on two fronts was planned for
2006, with RLI scheduled to move into Ukraine in the northeast, and
Albania on the Balkan coast.
Luckily for Hackl, he did not have
to manage this alone. The Raiffeisen Banking Group’s policy of
managing its leasing divisions in threes meant Hackl took the reins
with Dieter Scheidl and Arkadius Etryk.
Scheidl has responsibility for
Southeast Europe, including Bulgaria and the other Balkan states.
Etryk, in addition to acting as CEO for Raiffeisen’s Polish unit,
oversees the CIS and other Russian-speaking territories, using
Warsaw as his base of operations.
Hackl, with his experience of the
established CEE markets, is charged with supervision of the Czech,
Slovakian, Hungarian, Slovenian and Romanian businesses.
‘That was a fun job’
Up until 2008, Hackl worked within
this team to connect together each new dot on the Raiffeisen map,
building 2006’s Greenfield developments into RLI’s IT
infrastructure (“that was a fun job”, reminisces Hackl), and laying
the groundwork for 2008’s Moldova and Kosovo start-ups.
Inevitably, 2008 brought economic
slowdown to the CEE region, and the first lull in double-digit
growth for RLI. Although the current sales climate has eased
business processing pressure for Hackl, it has also provided “some
time to work on efficiency”.
He continues: “There are huge
discussions going on right now about how to improve processes and
to further strengthen cooperation with local Raiffeisen Banks.”
The biggest discussion at present
is about consolidating its regional IT systems.
“A truly international software
system is the dream of all big leasing networks,” admits Hackl,
before adding: “but maybe something we can hope for in 2020.”
As a solution in the meantime, he
intends to condense RLI’s roster of local software providers by
region: “Rather than having 16 different vendors, it would be
better to have five or six serving a different group of
countries.”
Even though the explosion of the
CEE leasing economies may have been halted for now, it seems that
Michael Hackl will be busy linking up the results of an astonishing
era of growth for as long as it takes for the market to recover.
When it does, he thinks, Raiffeisen will likely have a more stable
base than ever before from which to grow.
