Credit Suisse is cutting back in London. It’s refocusing its efforts on wealth management, views Asia-Pacific as the growth region and any investment banker must demonstrate their ‘synergies’ with the private banking division.
On the trading floor, anything macro (particularly in Europe) is under threat and the capital intensive prime services division is being rationalised. Meanwhile anyone in equities, but largely equity derivatives, is in a good position and managing directors in equity capital markets and M&A are likely to find their services in demand.
With that in mind, and the fact that 30% of UK headcount is on the block, it’s interesting to see who’s being hired in the City now. Either they’ve had the misfortune of joining the bank during a period of contraction, or Credit Suisse is still hiring, even for its new markets division.
There have been some significant hires in the past few weeks connected to Credit Suisse’s markets business.
Bertrand Elbaz, the former head of credit sales at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities, joined the Swiss bank earlier this month; Patrick Stockenvall, who was a managing director in Royal Bank of Scotland’s strategic insurance solutions group (having previously worked in equity derivatives) has joined its derivatives trading business and Alan Erskine, formerly head of consumer research at UBS, has joined in a similar role at Credit Suisse. Kamran Ahmed, an experienced derivatives trader, also joined from RBS as an interest rate options and derivatives trader earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Karsten Le Blanc, the head of client key partners for EMEA at Deutsche Bank, is now head of ultra-high-net-worth for the UK and international clients at Credit Suisse.
By contrast recruitment in Credit Suisse’s investment banking division (IBD) has been quiet and largely at a junior level. Badri Nath Wadawadigi, a VP in M&A, is the most senior recent recruit. Meanwhile associates Nikos Spiliopoulos (who joined from Barclays), Joseph Cheng (who returned to Credit Suisse from private equity firm Equistone Partners) and Simone Antonio Bonfiglio (who joined from Bloomberg) were all hired in recent months.
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