Now Ingo Wiedemeier is very lucky - and yet he is not right.

On the one hand, he is the CEO of the Frankfurter Sparkasse who is leading the venerable company into its third century.

Because this year the Frankfurter Sparkasse will be 200 years old, only a few companies in the region can look back on such a long history.

On the other hand, Corona may thwart the celebration planned for June on this occasion, at which the bank could show itself for what it is: not only the market leader in the Main metropolis, but also an important part of urban life.

But the New Year's concert in the Alte Oper, sponsored by the Sparkasse, has already been cancelled.

Manfred Koehler

Head of department of the Rhein-Main editorial team of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

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However, the times when bank bosses performed spectacularly are over anyway.

Such a thing would not fit at all with Wiedemeier.

His tone is authoritative and his judgment is considerate, but he doesn't shy away from tough decisions;

The new CEO had only been in office for nine months when he announced a significant reduction in the branch network in June 2021.

Something like this is likely to trigger even greater shocks in the house itself than it already does among the customers.

A confusing situation

It is fair to say that the 50-year-old manager was able to gradually prepare for the task of managing one of the largest savings banks in Germany.

He comes from Höxter in East Westphalia, where he trained at the savings bank and came to the Main to study.

The doctorate in business administration spent the following years at Sparkasse Hanau, where he started in 1999, was appointed to the board of directors in 2004 and became chairman of the board in 2015.

Two years ago, the money house east of Frankfurt had to hand over its boss to the larger savings bank in the Main metropolis;

Wiedemeier succeeded Robert Restani, who in turn had taken over as CEO of Frankfurter Sparkasse in 2015.

When Restani retired on September 1, 2020, Wiedemeier replaced him a second time,

He also stayed in Hanau with his family. You can forgive him, because this city is actually part of the business area of ​​the Frankfurter Sparkasse, just as it has branches in the Taunus. While the public law institutes generally do not compete with each other, customers in the Rhine-Main area find a rather confusing mixture of overlapping business areas, which has arisen historically and which nobody has wanted to get rid of - always worried that things will work out possibly lost customers of the savings bank group.

The fact that the Frankfurter Sparkasse is also committed to its presence beyond the city limits can be seen from the fact that the streamlining of the branch network is only taking place within the Main metropolis, where it is also particularly closely linked. In times of low interest rates, every bank has to keep costs under control, which also includes further digitization. Wiedemeier's plans include a digital consulting center with 65 employees, which is like an online branch. He names "moderate growth" as the company's goal. In these years, which are not easy for the banks, this is more ambitious than it sounds. But Wiedemeier is a Schalke fan, he himself was a goalkeeper at SV Höxter and played in the national league. Such a person knows only too well that difficult times are always followed by better, easier ones.