What equipped Credit Suisse's Asia head, Helman Sitohang, for the cut-throat world of investment banking after spending his formative years in communist Czechoslovakia?
Helman Sitohang is Credit Suisse's highest-ranking banker in Asia. The 51-year-old moves effortlessly between Asia and the bank's headquarters in Zurich, but little is known of his childhood in Czechoslovakia, then under communist government rule.
The investment banker's mother is Slovak. Sitohang's Indonesian father – from Sumatra – won a scholarship to study in Prague, where he met his future wife. It was there that Helman Sitohang was born and spent his early years.
Sitohang's family left Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic, in the 1970s, when the country's economy began stagnating and countless dissidents were imprisoned – or fled.
Aptitude for Math
In an interview with an internal publication, he speaks of his first day in an Indonesian school as a nine-year-old when his family moved back to Jakarta, but he was only fluent in Czech. An aptitude for mathematics saved him, Sitohang says.
«When we arrived in Jakarta, I spoke only Czech – and that didn't do me much good in school. It took me a few months to pick up the local language, but I was good at mathematics, so I was able to survive.»
The differences between Prague, then a dreary communist city where temperatures frequently dipped below zero in winter, and Jakarta, a colorful and thriving city in Southeast Asia, were stark.
From Orderly Prague to Vibrant Jakarta
«Prague was a beautiful city, very orderly, but also communist and not that vibrant. Jakarta, on the other hand, was just beginning to develop and was capitalist – and I found that incredibly exciting...Business was a constant topic of discussion – I noticed that immediately,» says Sitohang.
Now based in Singapore, he recalls how his family lived near Sudirman Road, now a major Jakarta thoroughfare but then little more than a local road on Sitohang's route to school.
«Back then, only one building in the entire city had 18 floors. My father and I would often go up to the top floor; we found it fascinating, having known only low, prefabricated buildings in Prague,» Sitohang says.
By his account, Sitohang quickly assimilated, going on to study engineering before getting his start as a derivatives banker at Bankers Trust. In 1999, shortly after Indonesia's economy bottomed out, he joined Credit Suisse.
