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The Swiss bank is nearing in on a candidate to succeed long-standing overseer Urs Rohner. finews.asia on the hottest contender who is virtually unknown – and a perfect complement to CEO Thomas Gottstein.

The Zurich-based bank wants to propose a successor for Urs Rohner, who is due to step down in April from presiding over Credit Suisse, it said on Thursday. Folded into the several other notable board moves, the news highlights the urgency for the Swiss bank: it has just six months until Rohner departs after ten years in the job.

This has been anything but an orderly succession so far: Credit Suisse's search process has been sluggish and tiresome, according to people familiar with the matter. Besides a series of «usual board suspects,» including the frequently-mentioned Philipp Hildebrand, several outside candidates either retreated or didn't make it past selection criteria, these people said.

Driving Force

They include Ulrich Koerner, a former top executive at Credit Suisse and more recently of UBS. His candidacy apparently didn't find favor with deputy chairman Severin Schwan. The Roche boss is a driving force in the process, which is being led by Singaporean native Kai Nargolwala, the board member who oversees Credit Suisse's succession committee. Efforts to find a woman to preside the bank apparently foundered as well.

The longer the search extended into now nine months since Rohner's exit was sealed, the clear it became that his successor would come from inside. All the more because the pandemic's travel shutdown hit the search process hard: an outsider to Switzerland as well as to the bank would have required far more space and time to get to know Credit Suisse, which the second wave has made impossible.

Several People Passed

The fact that Credit Suisse has left it so long proposing Rohner's replacement underpins the case for an internal candidate to step up, several people familiar with the process said. Credit Suisse CEO Thomas Gottstein is not privy to details of the process, they said; a spokesman for the bank didn't comment on succession.