Where does Thomas Gottstein want to tackle next

Credit Suisse has always wanted to be the bank for entrepreneurs. Now CEO Thomas Gottstein wants this statement to be more valid.

Credit Suisse (CS) has been very busy with itself in recent months. The embarrassing Spygate scandal was followed by a boss change, and then a large number of employees had to be sent home due to the pandemic.

The investment bank was reorganized and the Swiss retail business was recently restructured. The big bank wants to vigorously digitize there, cut jobs, and close one in four branches.

Bringing the central divisions closer

But now the CEO, who took office last February, is finding his way Thomas gottstein It’s time to get to the core of the performance promise of the second largest Swiss bank: CS wants to be the “entrepreneur bank,” in other words: to offer wealthy business owners investment banking and asset management from a single source.

However, to do this, cooperation between the relevant Investment Banking (IB) and International Asset Management (IWM) divisions must improve, particularly in international business.

“What we at the IWM have not done so well in the last five years compared to Switzerland and Asia is the cooperation between private banking and investment banking.” This is what Gottstein said at a conference organized by the financial newspaper “Finanz und Wirtschaft”.

“There we see our strengths”

Gottstein, an investment banker by nature, also explained how he envisions it: “If I sit down with an entrepreneur and the meeting lasts an hour, we first talk 45 minutes about his business, about financing and acquisitions.” There, according to the CEO of CS, it is important to hook. “Entrepreneurs want to talk to us about it, and that’s where we see our strengths.”

However, much remains to be done. According to the bank manager, IWM and corporate banking are not sufficiently connected. And: “A normal businessman has 90 percent of his money in the company and only 10 percent in bank assets.”

Do you speak E&E?

The global interconnection of the divisions is likely to be a project that CS will be primarily concerned with next year. Cooperation in the Asian and Swiss regions could serve as a model, as Gottstein pointed out.

In this country, the big bank was still under the aegis of the then CEO Tidjane thiam Since 2016, the Entrepreneurs & Executives (E&E) division has been promoted and its workforce has doubled. In 2019, E&E was more linked to the daily business; At the same time, a promise was made to expand the staff. It remains to be seen whether former Swiss chief Gottstein will do the same for IWM.