Juerg Hunziker wants to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty again after three years as CEO of Avaloq. He tells finews.asia how tokenization and cryptocurrency are poised to roil the banking sector.

Juerg Hunziker, you’ve had an eventful three years as CEO of Avaloq. Why not leave altogether?

I think often what happens when you're building a career and gain so much knowledge and expertise and come into an executive role as CEO, the bulk of your time is spent on corporate things like human resources or accounting issues. But what pays the bills and advances the company is time with your customers.

So you will go on the road again?

Our industry is changing at lightning speed. I see how many bankers are struggling with how the bank should look like two, three, or five years down the road. I can probably advise from a technology point of view more neutrally than before.

An ambassador-type role?

Please don't call me a vice-chairman who mainly goes for long lunches! I want to get my hands dirty, I want to be part of it.

You’re alluding to the lack of tech expertise in wealth management leadership.

In Europe, yes. UBS is making a statement with the new CEO from ING [Ralph Hamers], but most classical banking CEOs don’t come up through the IT ranks.

«We'll see a 'techie' as a wealth management CEO soon»

Vontobel CEO Zeno Staub ran a financial technology company many years ago. I think it shows in what they're doing now.

How long before we will see a techie as CEO of a Swiss private bank?

It’s already happened in asset management, retail banking, and capital markets. I would say it will happen in private banking in the next two years.

Covid-19 has been a kickstarter for digitization spending. What is the bigger theme here?

Investment dollars are shifting to customer engagement and not necessarily on the core. There is a lot more discussion about which clientele is actually contributing to your bottom line.

«Postfinance will also struggle with this»

A retail bank with about 280,000 customers I spoke to recently is losing money on 60,000 of them because they just have a cash account. I imagine this is also something that other institutions, such as Postfinance for example, struggle with.

This leads to an offering for affluent clients – a neglected segment for wealth managers.

I think it’s the piece that banks will fight hardest for – that's where the biggest potential now lies. The generation coming up with questions why only ultra-high net worth clients get top-class and access to things like private equity.

That’s not necessarily new, is it?

No, but these are the clientele who will go into tokenized assets if they can’t get services in a traditional way. The hype around tokenization and cryptocurrency – an enabler for democratizing wealth – is the next round of change in the banking landscape.

Jurg Hunziker has been CEO of Avaloq for the past three years, in a job he next months hands over to Thomas Beck and Martin Greweldinger, who will act as co-CEOs. Hunziker, who is Swiss, began his career as a foreign exchange trader at UBS and spent more than 25 years with Sungard, a software firm where he was responsible for financial trading, risk, and private banking software and technology services until 2015. He is an adviser to Swiss Peers, a Zurich-based fintech.