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Bloomberg
Credit Suisse Group AG’s Swiss unit began life as a legally independent company, enabling the bank to pursue plans to sell part of the business in a public offering next year.
In carving out a separate entity, Credit Suisse also fulfills a regulatory requirement to make banks easier to break up in a crisis or insolvency. Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG, a two-year-old project involving 1,500 employees, has its own license.
The Swiss subsidiary is one of the cornerstones of Chief Executive Officer Tidjane Thiam’s plan for raising capital after reshaping the company to expand wealth management and scale back investment banking.
The bank aims to raise as much as 4 billion francs ($4 billion) from a partial public offering of shares next year.
The Swiss universal bank contributed 29 percent of group revenue in the first nine months of this year and had the highest pretax profit of all the bank’s units. It also employs the biggest chunk of employees — 13,440 at the end of September.
Earlier this month, the head of Swiss operations, Thomas Gottstein, reshuffled management of the division, putting Didier Denat in charge of corporate and investment banking. Denat replaced Marco Illy, who will focus on important clients, a spokesman for Credit Suisse said.