While private banking in Switzerland seems to be on the retreat, France's Société Générale is about to expand its business – again.
Reculer pour mieux sauter: the French saying seems a fair description of the strategy of Société Générale in Switzerland. In October, the bank cut some 80 jobs at its private bank in Switzerland, which had some 400 employees in total. The operations in Lausanne were moved to Geneva, where the headquarters of the Swiss business is located.
But according to information obtained by finews.ch, the cuts are not the beginning of the end of the French bank's operations in Switzerland. Quite to the contrary: Société Générale is already finalizing plans to grab a bigger share of the market with seriously rich clients with its Swiss unit.
Hirings in Zurich, Geneva
Both the Zurich and Geneva offices are hiring new relationship managers.
However, the French bank still intends to keep out of Asia, where it sold its private banking in Hong Kong and Singapore to DBS in 2014.
New Broom in Zurich
The new steps in Switzerland are being coordinated by Olivier Lecler. Tobias Wagner (pictured below) has taking charge of the Zurich office in June, according to his profile on Linkedin.
Nicole Favre (COO), Antoine Blouin (Wealth Management Solutions) and Julien Duniague (Marketing and Sales) are further members of the executive committee.
Société Générale Private Banking (Suisse) plans to present its new strategy at the beginning of 2017. It will be interesting to see how far the project has been developed by then.
