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SEB settles with wealthy widow over bad advice

After a decade receiving misguided investment advice, an 89-year-old Swedish woman has negotiated a settlement with the SEB bank worth hundreds of thousands of kronor.

Published: 10 November 2009 17:48 CET

“I don’t think there are many old people out there who were deceived like I was,” Lillie Clinell told the Aftonbladet newspaper.

Clinell inherited several million kronor when her husband died 20 years ago. At the time, she decided to start banking with SEB bank, seeking advice from bank staff about how best to invest and administer the inheritance.

“I figured it was a trustworthy bank and I trusted the adviser I was assigned; we ended up becoming friends,” said Clinell

But after a while, the 89-year-old’s daughter became suspicious when she realized that the balances in her mother’s accounts kept shrinking.

As it turns out, SEB has advised Clinell to place her money in endowment insurance policies, several of which resulted in heavy losses.

In addition, some of the policies Clinell was advised to purchase when she was 85 years old were only due to mature if she reached her 105th birthday.

“My daughter found one mistake after another. I felt relaxed and secure, but the whole time they had gone behind my back in all sorts of ways,” Clinell said of SEB.

When Clinell and her daughter confronted the bank about its questionable investment advice, SEB representatives admitted they had failed to properly advise the widow.

They recently agreed to pay Clinell 700,000 kronor ($100,000) in compensation in an out-of-court settlement, Sveriges Television (SVT) news programme Aktuellt reports.

The bank refused to comment to SVT on the matter.

While Clinell is satisfied with the financial aspect of the settlement, she fears that others may also be victimized by their willingness to trust.

“It feels like you can’t trust people and I think this happens to a lot of old people without them realizing it,” Clinell told Aftonbladet.

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Three ways Sweden's slashed interest rate will boost your finances

Lower mortgage rates

The policy rate is not the same as the interest rate on your mortgage, although they are linked. In a policy rate prognosis from March, the bank predicted that the policy rate could drop to as low as 2.75 percent by the end of 2025, a drop of 1.25 percentage points since the beginning of 2024.

If mortgage rates drop by the same amount, you could expect a drop in the monthly cost of a 3 million kronor mortgage of around 3,000 kronor a month, not including the tax rebate for interest costs.

IN FIGURES: How could lower interest rates affect your Swedish mortgage?

Higher property prices

As mortgage rates get lower, the housing market is likely to improve, as buyers know their monthly costs aren’t going to skyrocket due to ever-rising interest rates.

If you already own a home and you’re planning on buying and selling at the same time in the market, this will affect you less, as the price of your new home will most likely go up at the same rate as the price of your old home, but this is good news for anyone planning on selling.

It’s worse news for first-time buyers, who will have to save a larger deposit as prices go up, but on the other hand they’ll get lower mortgage rates and a more stable policy rate makes it easier to plan ahead for the future without being surprised by ever-increasing rates.

A stronger Swedish economy

The Riksbank’s decision to lower the interest rate is proof that the bank believes inflation is over – for now at least. This means that we can expect to see inflation remain at a more stable level, and we’re unlikely to see anything close to the ten percent inflation we saw at the end of 2022.

Lower inflation means that Swedish monetary policy won’t need to be as cautious or restrictive in the future, as the government and the central bank no longer need to put all their efforts into fighting inflation.

That’s not to say that authorities will start stimulating the economy just yet – they’re likely to proceed with caution to make sure inflation really is down for the long-term – but Thursday’s interest rate announcement indicates that the “economic winter” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson warned of in September last year could be drawing to a close.

Is it all good news?

In the short term, the value of the krona is likely to worsen somewhat, as the central bank has lowered Sweden’s interest rate ahead of other major central banks. The krona weakened slightly after the bank’s announcement on Thursday, dropping 8 öre in value against the dollar and 7 öre against the euro.

This is good news for people with income in other currencies, but bad news for those of us who are paid in kronor.

Having said that, a stronger Swedish economy is good news for the value of the krona in the long term, although it’s difficult to predict when the krona will start to gain in value and by how much.

At the end of last year, Riksbank governor Erik Thedéen described the krona as “undervalued”, and underlined the importance of having strong foundations in the Swedish economy.

“The Swedish economy is, at its foundations, well-managed, and sooner or later this will lead to a stronger exchange rate,” he said. “Sweden has strong finances, a well-educated labour force, responsible salaries and a good underlying level of competition.”

“As anyone who has tried to predict the exchange rate knows, it’s genuinely difficult to say exactly when it will go up and by how much, but it can also happen quickly when the trend is broken and the krona starts to gain in value.”

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