Karlis Korka: There are no „my“ or „your“ issues in Holm

I joined the Holm team a few months back to work on something that’s close to my heart – credit risk modelling. It’s an exciting area, and a challenging one, and I felt that in Holm I’d be able to take my technical and professional skills to the next level and be useful to the company at the same time.

Credit risk is an important issue for any bank – and for me, as a specialist in credit risk models, it’s the most important issue of all 😊. Holm's history as a financial services provider dates back more than a quarter of a century, but as a bank, we’re only just entering our fourth year. One of the things I’m in charge of is developing credit risk assessment models. Compared to big corporations, this process is a lot more effective in Holm: there are fewer bureaucratic ‘legacy’ processes here. As a result, the time it takes to go from concept to actual client evaluation is a lot shorter and the whole process is more flexible. 

I would say there’s a real synergy between the departments in the bank. In big companies with lots of organisational silos, you sometimes encounter a “not my problem” attitude. But here in Holm, I’ve never hesitated to ask a colleague from another department for help – there are no ‘my’ or ‘your’ problems here, just shared challenges we all face and solve as a collective by coming together and sharing our know-how and experience from all of our fields. Mutual challenges lead to mutual success, and I feel genuinely inspired working here. In the few months I've been with the bank, it’s shaped my attitude, too. When it comes to tackling jobs, I don't just look at things from the perspective of credit risk, but I can now see the impact on the company as a whole. In my opinion, the Holm team show a lot of initiative – more than the average – and have a real sense of ownership: they take responsibility in their particular areas and make sure nothing is ignored. To really succeed in such an environment, you need good self-management skills and have to ensure that the issues on the table are sensibly prioritised and that each task can be resolved with due care and attention to detail. Once a job’s been done, you feel the positive impact of it on the whole company – and as experience shows, people don’t hold back when good feedback and praise is in order!