Credit Suisse heavyweight Francesco de Ferrari surprised observers by leaving one of the top Asian private banking jobs. What is the Swiss banker leaving for?
The seemingly orderly handover of Credit Suisse’s Asian private bank from Francesco de Ferrari to two top European bankers belies the magnitude of the move.
As the head of Credit Suisse’s private bank for the last seven years, de Ferrari is one of the biggest fish in the Asian wealth management pond. He got a major boost in 2015 from the entrance of Credit Suisse CEO Tidjane Thiam, who reorganized Asia as a separate unit outside the wider private bank.
De Ferrari is credited with overhauling Credit Suisse's operating model and hiking assets under management and profitability. Under his tenure, non-Asians such as Benjamin Cavalli and Francois Monnet, who have succeeded him, rose to great prominence.
Write His Own Ticket
In short, the 49-year-old is at a phase in his career where can write his own ticket. Then why is the Swiss banker leaving his plum job in Singapore and packing up his wife and five children to manage a $139 billion wealth manager in Sydney?
The simplest explanation is for the challenge. AMP is mired in a major scandal over misleading customers and lying to its regulator. The revelations have already wiped out the CEO and part of the wealth manager’s board and top management, and AMP is bleeding assets.
The 170-year-old AMP needs a «clean-skin», or someone untainted from outside to clean up. «I’m confident we can earn back trust which will underpin the recovery of business performance», Swiss-Italian dual citizen de Ferrari said on Wednesday.
Calcutta, Sunnies, Big Food
The fact that he was never an unequivocal private banker may serve him well: early in his career he nixed a graduate job with Goldman Sachs for the streets of Calcutta. He later described spending a few months «picking dying people off the street" with Mother Teresa.
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