3. Lukewarm in Asia
A rise in profits in the Helman Sitohang-led region belies an uncomfortable truth: Credit Suisse suffered withdrawals from wealthy mainland Chinese clients in the fourth quarter. For a foreign wealth manager somewhat late to plunging into China despite Thiam’s avowed preference for its prospects, this is worrying. Elsewhere, the region saw higher revenue in private banking – but only just eked out a break-even in capital markets.
4. Global Markets – a Beaming Problem Child
Global Markets, the trading unit which used to be the epicenter of the «old» Credit Suisse, was CEO Thiam’s problem child right from the beginning. Having started on the premise that the risky and capital-intensive trading had to be reigned in and wealth management expanded, the bank’s top executive was forced to acknowledge a billion-franc writedown right at the start. But the cut-to-size division remained a low-profit unit despite reducing risk and leverage.
It is not without irony then that the problem child did very well in 2019. Revenues from trading activities across the bank increased a whopping 179 percent, and pretax profit was up sixfold to $960 million. Thiam successor Thomas Gottstein – an investment banker by training – likely will mull whether to let the business more leeway to do its magic.
5. Swiss Jewel
During his four-year reign, Thiam was forced to reduce his ambitious targets across the bank – apart from the ones he set the Swiss universal bank, or SUB. Having decided against taking the Swiss unit public in 2017 paid off once more in 2019: in a saturated home market, Credit Suisse generated pretax profit by 8 percent to 2.3 billion francs, helped in part by a slight decline in operating expenses.
The Swiss unit is the crown jewel of Credit Suisse – a business that Thiam didn’t have to do much to improve and which helped its now ex-boss Gottstein assume the top job at the bank.
