How to play SejrBank
The complete guide to the banking simulator. Every system on your CEO desktop, what it does, and how to use it to run a bank from a one-branch savings house to a global giant.
The goal — local to global
You are the newly appointed CEO of SEJR Sparekasse, a savings bank founded in 1897 in the Danish harbour town of Sejrby: one branch, a proud history, and a sleepy balance sheet. Your mandate is to grow it — from local, to regional, to national, to international, to global — without blowing it up.
You win when you’re licensed in all six markets, exceed roughly 600 mia. kr in assets, hold solid capital, and — because a global bank must be resolvable — carry full TLAC (loss-absorbing capacity of ~21.5% of risk-weighted assets): the Financial Stability Board designates you a Global Systemically Important Bank — “too big to fail.”
You lose if your equity is wiped out, if the regulator seizes you after three capital warnings, or if the board fires you for poor returns. There’s a blue screen. You won’t like it.
The five numbers that matter
Everything in the game ladders up to five figures. Watch them in CoreBank every year.
Equity ÷ risk-weighted assets. Your loss buffer. Keep it above 12%; below the minimum, the regulator seizes you.
Cash + bonds ÷ deposits. Keep ≥ 10%. Banks die of illiquidity faster than losses — on a Friday, not a decade.
What your book earns after funding costs. 2–3% is healthy; it compresses over the decades.
Credit losses. Small in booms, brutal in recessions. Your standards today decide your losses in the next downturn.
Net income ÷ equity. What the owners — and the board — care about. 10%+ is good banking.
The growth loop
Every stage of the game runs the same loop, just bigger:
- Attract deposits — through branches, competitive rates, reputation and digital convenience.
- Lend them out profitably — hire loan officers, price your books, set credit standards.
- Retain earnings — profit builds capital (keep the dividend low while you grow).
- Capital unlocks growth — licenses, branches, departments and acquisitions.
- Repeat, in a bigger market.
And overlaying it all: the economic cycle — expansion, peak, recession, recovery. Be boring at the top (tighten credit, build capital); be greedy at the bottom (buy failing rivals cheaply). The banks that win decade after decade bring dry powder to the trough.
Rates aren’t a single number, either. There’s a short (policy) rate and a long (10y) rate, and a bank earns the slope between them — borrow short, lend long. A steep curve means fat margins; a flat one, thin. And when the curve inverts (short rate above long), two things happen: your margin gets squeezed, and — because inversion means the market is betting on rate cuts — a recession is being forecast. An inverted curve has preceded almost every downturn. It’s the single best early-warning signal on your desk (watch it in RiskWatch): when it inverts, de-risk before the storm.
🖥️ The cockpit
🖥️ CoreBank 3270 · the ledger
Your cockpit. A green-screen mainframe terminal showing the full balance sheet, last month’s income statement, and the five key ratios. Open it constantly — it’s how you catch a problem before it becomes a seizure.
📊 ChartRoom · analytics
Your history in charts — assets, equity, deposits and loans over time, monthly net income, solvency and margins, and efficiency & returns. The best way to see whether you’re compounding or drifting.
📁 Group Performance · the CEO’s real job
A bank isn’t one balance sheet — it’s a portfolio of businesses. This screen breaks the group into divisions (Retail, Commercial, Corporate, Wealth, Markets, Bancassurance), each with its own revenue, cost/income ratio, cost-of-risk, allocated capital and return on tangible equity — decomposed with Funds Transfer Pricing, so a cheap deposit franchise shows its value where it’s earned. Then you do the thing CEOs actually spend their time on: allocate scarce capital toward the divisions earning the best return. It’s zero-sum — backing one pulls growth from another.
🤝 ClientBook 360 · the customer franchise
The deepest idea in the game: a bank is not a balance sheet with products attached — it is a portfolio of customer relationships. Five segments (mass retail, affluent, private banking, small business, mid-corporates), each with a primary-bank share — are we their salary account, their firm’s operating and payments account, the bank they’d never bother to leave? — and a cross-sell depth (products per customer). Primacy makes deposits sticky, cheap and run-proof; depth makes every relationship worth more, feeding wealth AUM, insurance, payments volume and loan demand. Payments capability and the wallet win primacy; payroll-switching drives and needs-based cross-sell programs deepen it. A customer won on rate alone leaves on rate alone.
💰 Lending & funding
📝 LoanDesk Pro · make loans
Price each loan book (mortgages, consumer, SME, commercial real estate, corporate) against the market, set your bank-wide credit standards, and approve big-ticket deals in the credit committee. Price above market for fatter margins and less volume; below market and demand floods in on thin margins.
💳 DepositMaster · raise funding
Set the rates on checking, savings and term deposits. Deposits are the raw material of banking. Checking accounts are gold — nearly-free money that follows branches, reputation and digital convenience rather than rates.
📈 TreasuryStation · ALM & capital
The heart of balance-sheet management. Buy and sell bonds (and choose their duration — the interest-rate-risk lever that sank real banks in 2023), draw wholesale funding, issue covered bonds, hedge with swaps, raise equity, pay dividends, buy back shares, and securitize loan books to recycle capital. This is where you keep the bank solvent and liquid.
📊 Trading & fee businesses
As you scale, income should stop coming only from lending. Two departments (HQ Organizer) add diversified earnings — each with real income, and real tail risk.
📊 Markets Desk · trading
Once established, the dealing room lives on the TreasuryStation tab. It earns a positive carry on bonds, FX and market-making — steady income in calm years that scales with your securities book. But you set the desk’s risk appetite: crank it up and the expected income rises alongside a fatter negative tail — including the occasional rogue-trader blow-up that punches a hole in equity. Upgrading the desk both grows income and tightens its risk limits.
🛡️ Bancassurance · insurance & pensions
Sell insurance and pensions across your customer base for steady premium income that doesn’t move with the credit cycle — the natural hedge to decades of margin compression. Its own tail is the catastrophe year, when claims spike above premiums. Together with Wealth Management, it’s how a mature bank keeps its return on equity up as lending spreads thin.
📐 Risk & the regulator
📐 RiskWatch · risk management
See your loss profile by book (probability of default, loss given default, risk weight), run a severe-recession stress test before every expansion, and manage the non-performing-loan workout desk. Defaulted loans sit here earning nothing until your risk analysts resolve them.
⚖️ RegLink · the FSA portal
The regulator’s portal: your prudential requirements, formal warnings, compliance staffing, and license register. The rulebook evolves through your career — Basel II, Basel III, SIFI buffers — so the capital bar rises over time. Three warnings, or a ratio below the hard floor for three months, and you’re seized.
💧 Modern liquidity & provisioning · the 2010s+ rulebook
Two realities define a modern bank’s risk. IFRS 9: you hold a forward-looking expected-credit-loss allowance on the healthy book, so when the macro outlook darkens, provisions spike before a single loan defaults — then release in the recovery. It’s the biggest reason bank earnings lurch through the cycle. And the liquidity rules (LCR and NSFR, binding from ~2015, in TreasuryStation): hold enough high-quality liquid assets to survive a 30-day run, and fund long assets with stable money. Crucially, not all deposits are equal — uninsured, corporate, rate-shopping balances run first and fastest, and a big, digital, corporate-heavy book is more fragile. That’s how Silicon Valley Bank died in 2023.
📐 Rate risk, stress tests & conduct · the ALCO & the supervisor
Three more things that fill a real CEO’s day. Interest-rate risk (IRRBB), on the RiskWatch ALCO panel: you borrow short and lend long, so a rate rise lifts near-term income but lowers the economic value of your equity — the panel shows both (ΔEVE and ΔNII to a ±200bp shock), and swaps let you trade one against the other. Supervisory stress tests (from ~2014): each year the regulator projects your capital through a severe recession, and if you’d fall near your minimum, dividends and buybacks are suspended until you pass. And conduct & operational risk (RegLink): mis-selling remediation, litigation, market-conduct fines, fraud and outages — the losses that aren’t credit or market, built by an aggressive culture and fragile technology, and the thing that has ended more bank CEOs than credit ever has.
🏛️ The G-SIB endgame · leverage, MREL & TLAC
Two constraints define the biggest banks. The leverage ratio (from ~2018, in TreasuryStation) is a non-risk backstop — Tier 1 capital over your total balance sheet, minimum 3% and more for giants. It binds independently of CET1: stuff the book with 0%-risk-weight government bonds and your risk-based capital looks bulletproof while leverage quietly slides toward the floor. And MREL / TLAC: a bank “too big to fail” must instead be resolvable, holding loss-absorbing capacity of ~21.5% of risk-weighted assets — equity plus issued bail-in-able debt — so a collapse never reaches the taxpayer. That debt pays a subordinated spread (the price of scale), and full TLAC is a requirement to be designated a G-SIB. The endgame isn’t just getting big; it’s being big safely.
🏢 Growing the bank
🏢 BranchNet · markets & branches
Apply for banking licenses and open branches across six markets — Sejrby, Jutland, Copenhagen (Zealand), the Nordics, Europe and Global. Going international requires a regional headquarters first. Branches gather deposits and create loan demand; market share converges slowly, so patience or acquisitions.
🏛️ HQ Organizer · departments
A small bank can’t run every product. Establish departments as you grow and can carry their cost — Risk, Consumer Credit, IT, Treasury, Corporate Banking, Wealth Management, Investment Banking, the Markets Desk and Bancassurance — then upgrade them from Established to Professional to World-class for better models, cheaper funding and more volume. A live org chart shows your bank’s structure grow.
🤝 DealMaker · mergers & acquisitions
Buy your rivals, in cash or half-stock. Recessions put weak banks on fire sale at 40–60% off. The sector consolidates around you too — rivals merge, snipe fire sales and counter-bid, and one day someone will try to buy you. Every acquisition is your road to G-SIB.
👥 People, brand & governance
👥 PersonnelPlus · human resources
Hire the staff that make the bank run: branch tellers, loan officers (your growth speed), risk analysts (fewer losses), compliance officers (no fines), IT engineers (digital + security) and investment bankers (fees at scale).
🧑💼 Talent & Culture · the staff vs the owners
How you pay and lead people, which turns out to drive risk more than any spreadsheet. Set pay competitiveness (underpay and your rainmakers defect as a bloc and executives resign — their job landing back on your desk; overpay and shareholders reject your pay at the say-on-pay vote), bonus intensity (a hungry, all-or-nothing bonus culture breeds short-termism and misconduct), and deferral with malus & clawback (aligns behaviour and claws back cost when a scandal hits). All of it feeds the culture index — a multiplier on conduct risk, retention and productivity. Post-2014 the EU caps variable pay at 100% of fixed. And build a succession bench: a bank must never depend on one person, including you.
🗓️ CEO Office · your desk & your team
The heart of the local-to-global transformation. Your attention is a finite resource — and complexity grows super-linearly with size. A one-branch bank runs fine solo; a global bank drowns anyone who won’t delegate. Hire a C-suite (CFO, Treasurer, Chief Credit Officer, COO) and delegate, or things start slipping off your desk. Also: your daily calendar, the decisions only you can make, and your annual doctrine.
👔 BoardRoom · the owners
The board watches your return on equity against a target that rises with your size. Hit it and they back you; miss it, collect regulator warnings, or hoard lazy capital and their confidence falls. Below the line at an annual review and you’re replaced — a different game-over from a seizure. Shows your share valuation (price-to-book) too.
📈 Investor Relations · the market
You don’t just answer to the board — you answer to the market. Give the street guidance (a RoTE target) and then, every quarter, beat it or miss it. The share price re-rates on the surprise; analysts move you from Buy to Sell; and a cheap, chronically-missing stock draws activist investors who demand cost cuts, capital reallocation and higher payouts. A rich share price is currency for acquisitions and buybacks; a poor one makes raising equity painfully dilutive. Promise carefully — then deliver.
📣 AdWorks & 💾 SysAdmin · brand & technology
AdWorks sets your marketing budget and tracks reputation (which drives deposits and how cheaply you can raise equity). SysAdmin sets your IT budget and digital capability — from paper and pneumatic tubes to internet and mobile banking — and defends against cyber attacks.
💳 PayRails · payments & the fintech war
Payments is a real business, not a fee footnote: card issuing (interchange), merchant acquiring (the POS / merchant-service-charge side), wallets, cross-border FX and Banking-as-a-Service — each with transaction volume, a take rate and fraud. It’s capital-light and, done well, one of your highest-return divisions. But it’s the front line of disruption: EU interchange caps (2015) halved card revenue, PSD2 / Open Banking (2018) hands fintechs the keys to your customers (an opportunity if you’re strong, a threat if you’re weak), and neobanks and Big-Tech wallets unbundle the bank. Your response is the classic strategic fork — build your own rails (slow, cheap, you own it), buy a paytech (fast, dilutive, mostly goodwill), partner via BaaS (co-opt the disruptors, cede the customer), or launch a mobile wallet (network effects, a moat). Neglect it and you become dumb pipes behind someone else’s app.
✉️ Comms & learning
✉️ CEO Mail · events & decisions
Your inbox drives the story: loan applications, acquisition offers, regulator notices, fraud, cyber, price wars, and the decisions only a CEO can make. Read it — offers expire and fire sales get sniped.
🎓 SejrBank Academy · learn to master it
A drill school with six focused scenarios — the bank run, the duration trap, the credit reckoning, the fortress, the dealmaker, the zero era — each isolating one master skill, with pass/gold grading and honest debriefs. Plus a retired-director mentor who teaches you the moment each hard thing first happens, a six-domain report card on your career, and a full lexicon of banking terms.
🏆 League Table · global leaderboard
Every career you finish is ranked against every banker on SejrBank — by the size of the bank you built, its return on equity, and how fast you reached global G-SIB status. Four boards (Overall, Biggest bank, Fastest G-SIB, Most profitable), all-time and this-week. A weekly challenge: everyone plays the same scenario from the same seed. Duels: agree any code word with a rival — you both play the identical world (same crises on the same dates) and your finished careers land on that duel’s own board. And a pace tracker: your five-year asset checkpoints against the current record run — are you on a legend’s trajectory? Sign in on sejrbank.com to compete.
👑 The endgame · year 31 and beyond
The G-SIB designation is not the credits — it’s a promotion to a harder job. Your capital surcharge climbs with your systemic bucket, so being a giant must be profitable, not just big. Politics arrives: windfall taxes on fat years, parliamentary hearings where a clean conduct record performs and a dirty one is mauled. Activists spot the conglomerate discount and demand you spin off divisions — crystallize the value, or defend the universal bank with delivered returns. Above the crown sits one final rung: the largest bank on Earth. And when the story is told, the last decision is yours: announce your retirement (BoardRoom) and be graded on the legacy — including whether the bank you built survives your leaving. That’s what the succession bench was for.
🏰 The fortress doctrine — playing it like the greats
Beyond the ratios, the sim now models the habits that separate legendary bank CEOs from the rest.
🎯 Enforce your limits · concentration kills
RiskWatch shows your ten biggest exposures — corporate names and, once you run a Markets Desk, hedge-fund counterparties — against a single-name limit you set as a share of Tier 1. Exposures creep when appetite is high and nobody trims them. A counterparty allowed far past the limit into a falling market defaults, and the unwind takes a bite of your equity that discipline would have avoided entirely. It’s never the position that kills a bank; it’s the concentration.
📱 Survive the app-speed run — then be the rescuer · crisis as opportunity
Since the smartphone era, a bank run takes a weekend: a viral thread, then uninsured and corporate money leaving at the speed of a phone tap. Your armor is the franchise (primary customers don’t sprint), a fat LCR, and — mid-run — the choice between drawing a public wall of central-bank cash or facing the cameras (only works if the numbers are unarguable). And when other banks fail in a systemic storm, the regulator calls the strongest balance sheet on a Sunday night: a failed bank at a crisis price, with the state absorbing most of the bad book. Fortress banks get these calls. Leveraged banks get seized.
🧠 Run technology as offense · and cyber as existential
From the mid-2010s, a Data & AI platform (SysAdmin) turns technology from a cost center into a weapon: sharper credit models book fewer bad loans, automation cuts the cost/income ratio, models find the next product for every customer — and it compounds. The flip side: every digital ambition (wallet, acquiring, BaaS) widens your attack surface, and a mega-breach costs real equity, craters trust, and can light the fuse of a run. Engineers, budget, a modern core and AI detection are the only defense.
🏗️ Choose the decade over the quarter · and buy at the bottom
The market you report to lives quarter to quarter; great banks don’t. The Decade Fund (Investor Relations) commits three years of investment that drags this year’s RoTE — analysts will downgrade you for it — and compounds into a permanent cost and capability edge. And when the recession comes, windows open that exist at no other time: rivals’ best people for sensible pay, fitted-out branches at 45% off, failed banks for a fraction of book. The strong hand buys at the bottom. That’s what the fortress is for.
🌐 Earn the universal-bank premium · five engines, one bank
Net interest, payments, wealth & insurance, investment banking, trading — when the mix is balanced, they never all bleed at once. The market pays for that stability: a better funding rating, cheaper wholesale money, and a board that stays calm through recessions. Group Performance shows your earnings diversification score; push it above 50 and the “fortress premium” is yours.
Ten tips to rule the world
- Treat 12% CET1 as your personal floor, not the regulator’s 8–10.5%.
- Grow the loan book and raise the capital to carry it together — never one without the other.
- Idle cash earns nothing — park it in bonds. Cash is liquidity, not solvency.
- Hire loan officers early — they’re the cheapest growth there is.
- Tighten credit standards at the peak; the loans that look safest there are the most dangerous.
- In a recession, stop expanding and go shopping — buy failing rivals at a discount.
- Don’t let commercial real estate pass ~20% of your loan book.
- Fund with deposits and covered bonds, not wholesale — it freezes in a crisis.
- Fight margin compression with scale, fee income (wealth, bancassurance, trading) and cost control.
- As you grow, delegate — build your executive team before you become the bottleneck.
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