Andre Helfenstein, the head of Credit Suisse’s Swiss business, told the local newspaper NZZ that client withdrawals have stopped going down and, in some cases, even gone up.
Last month, Switzerland’s second-largest bank said it expected to lose up to 1.5 billion Swiss francs ($1.62 billion) before taxes in the fourth quarter. It also said that wealthy clients had taken out a lot of money.
Credit Suisse is trying to get back on its feet after a series of scandals. It is doing this by putting more emphasis on its wealth management business and cutting back on investment banking.
“In Switzerland, things have settled down. “We are talking to customers, and some of them have already gotten their money back,” Helfenstein said.
Related: In a revamped cash call, Credit Suisse raises a “milestone” of $2.4 billion.
In an interview with NZZ, Helfenstein was asked if the bank had to give customers special deals to keep them.
He said, “Only in the middle and upper customer segments, and only in a targeted way.”
Helfenstein also said in the interview that the bank’s rough year had hurt employee morale, but he didn’t think that employee turnover in Switzerland was a big problem for the bank as a whole.
“Our staff turnover rate is between 8 and 8.5 percent most of the time.” “At the moment, it’s only a little bit higher,” he said.
Axel Lehmann, the head of Credit Suisse, said that some of the funds that clients had taken out had come back in and that very few clients had left the company completely.
$1 is worth 0.9251 Swiss francs.
