Credit Suisse’s long-standing vice-chairman Severin Schwan has decided not to stand for re-election at this April’s annual general meeting. Schwan is chief executive of Swiss pharmaceutical producer Roche, a major client of the bank. He has been on the Credit Suisse board since 2014.
Another veteran director, Kai Nargolwala, will also step down next month. He has been on the board since 2013. Before that, he was chief executive and chairman of the Asia-Pacific business. He joined the bank from Standard Chartered in 2008.
Christian Gellerstad will replace Schwan as vice-chairman and lead independent director. He has been on the board since 2019. He was previously chief executive of Pictet Wealth Management and a member of parent company Pictet’s board.
In addition, Juan Colombas has also decided not to stand for re-election. He only joined the board last year and was a former colleague of Antonio Horta-Osorio, who had to resign as chairman earlier this year after admitting he breached Covid quarantine regulations last year.
Colombas was appointed last August, just months after Horta-Osorio joined. The duo worked together at Lloyds Banking Group. Colombas was chief risk officer and then chief operating officer between 2011 and 2020, when Horta-Osorio was chief executive of the UK lender.
Colombas joined the board at the same time as Axel Lehmann, former chief operating officer of UBS. He has been proposed as Horta-Osorio’s successor as chairman.
Replacing the three departing members will be Mirko Bianchi, Keyu Jin and Amanda Norton.
Bianchi was chief financial officer at UniCredit for four years until 2020 when he became head of wealth management and private banking at the Italian lender. He left last September. He has also worked at UBS and Deutsche Bank.
Jin is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics. She is a Chinese citizen and previously worked at the International Monetary Fund. Norton has been chief risk officer at Wells Fargo for the last three years. She previously worked at JP Morgan and Bank of America.
Last year, Credit Suisse made a series of appointments to overhaul its risk management practices following a series of mishaps culminating in taking SFr5bn (US$5.5bn) of losses from prime broking client Archegos Capital Management.
Last week, chief executive Thomas Gottstein said trading had stabilised in the first two months of the year before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 but was cautious about the impact of more recent events on the final weeks of the first quarter.
“The first two months were relatively solid. If you compare with last year, it's much lower. But if you go back to 2019 and 2020, it's kind of similar,” he said at a conference. “It is very difficult to make any prediction in this market at the moment, but we are satisfied with the first two months.”