Sweden-based bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) has broad business activities, a strong position among large Nordic corporates, and increasingly stable revenues from its merchant banking and retail operations. SEB's Nordic and German businesses have supported increasing revenues, and SEB has used this additional scale and cost controls to improve its efficiency. We believe this continued improvement will support further capital generation, which could lead SEB to achieve capitalization in line with our strong assessment by the end of 2015. We continue to assess SEB's stand-alone credit profile at 'a-' and we are affirming our ratings on SEB at 'A+/A-1'. The outlook remains negative because we think that uplift from potential extraordinary government support for Swedish banks will likely be
