Were you born in the Basel area?
Yes.
From a banking family?
Not at all.
How did you get into banking?
When I was 16, I had the choice of continuing school or to go and work in a small bank. I decided to do the latter. There's a scheme in Switzerland of apprenticeships which at the time lasted three years. You had an employer and then, in parallel, you attended school part time.
The bank I joined was really a securities broker, which brought me to the stock exchange every day. That ensured I learned about the stock market from scratch, the old-fashioned way. I had to run round the floor of the exchange with pieces of paper. The bulk of volume at this particular firm was arbitrage between other Swiss exchanges or foreign exchanges. Stocks such as the Royal Dutch Shell or Unilever were already traded in Switzerland. This was the late 1960s. We made pretty good money from this type of arbitrage. The only communication device was the phone.