Awards for Excellence 2017
At Credit Suisse, the Asia-Pacific wealth management business is tasked with little short of saving the whole bank worldwide. While the bank struggles globally, it has at least had the common sense to deploy capital in the places it is good at, specifically serving Asia-Pacific entrepreneurs. That makes the bank our winner for Asian wealth management.
Suitably bolstered with risk-weighted assets, the model of the newly formed Apac division is, in essence, to get entrepreneurs into the private banking side and then serve their investment banking needs. It is not a unique model but it is most clearly expressed at Credit Suisse, with both sides of the business in one division with a single P&L.
And it appears to be working. In 2016, the private banking business in Asia achieved net new asset inflows of SFr13.6 billion ($14 billion), an annualized growth rate of 9%, despite being the bank most obviously impacted by the Indonesian tax amnesty. Assets under management increased 11% during the year to SFr167 billion and net revenues were up 17% to SFr1.37