Willibald Cernko will become CEO of Erste Group on July 1, 2022. The current corporate client board member of Erste Bank Oesterreich was appointed on Wednesday in an extraordinary meeting by the supervisory board of Erste Group to succeed CEO Bernd Spalt, who surprisingly announced a month ago that he would not renew his contract. Cernko (65) will also assume the role of Chief Retail Officer at Erste Group.
“I am very pleased that in Willi Cernko we have found a customer-oriented, experienced and well-connected CEO for Erste Group,” said Erste Group Supervisory Board Chairman Friedrich Rödler, according to the broadcast. “I am taking over the chairmanship of an excellently run and strongly positioned banking group and I am very pleased with this new role,” said Cernko.
List of influential posts
Cernko (65) is thus expanding his long list of influential positions in domestic banking with the CEO of Erste Group. Born in Knittelfelder, he started his career at Raiffeisen. His path then led to the Creditanstalt in Vienna, which became part of Bank Austria thanks to the merger and was subsequently acquired by HVB and then by UniCredit. Only then did he join the savings bank group.
Creditanstalt shaped Cernko
Cernko moved from the Raiffeisenkasse Obdach-Weißkirchen to the Creditanstalt in 1985, which shaped him in such a way that 30 years later, when the institute had long since ceased to exist, he pointed to his strong roots in “CA”. In 1998 the Creditanstalt was merged into Bank Austria, where Cernko led the Eastern European activities from April 2002. However, it was only a year before he was appointed to the board of directors of Bank Austria, where he was responsible for the private client business. In 2006 he also held this position at HypoVereinsbank (HVB), shortly before UniCredit took over there.
At the end of 2007, under pressure from the German financial markets regulator, he had to choose between the two board positions at sister banks Bank Austria and HVB – and he went to Munich and gave up the Vienna board position, but remained represented on important UniCredit committees. In Milan, he was responsible for the two core markets of Austria and Germany for the retail customer division at group level, until he returned to Austria in October 2009 as CEO of Bank Austria UniCredit.
At Erste Group since 2017
He held this position until 2016. When he did not leave voluntarily, the media wrote, “In the financial sector, it is likely that Cernko does not consider his career over yet.” This assumption soon turned out to be correct. In early 2017, Cernko became Chief Risk Officer at Erste Group, from July 2019 he was a board member for corporate clients at Erste Bank Oesterreich and from January 2021 he was also deputy CEO of Erste Bank. From there, the Erste Group supervisory board has now appointed him to the top position in the holding company.
Source: Krone
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
