7. Boris Collardi
It was the Swiss private banking dynamo's decade for the taking. After quickly advancing at Credit Suisse in Switzerland and in Singapore, Boris Collardi inherited the CEO job at Julius Baer after the suicide death of his mentor, Alex Widmer. Collardi was 34 at the time.
In nine years running Julius Baer, the Swiss-Italian banker dramatically altered the 129-year-old Zurich wealth manager: GAM was spun off, and Julius Baer bought up a host of smaller rivals including GPS Brazil, NSC Asesores in Mexico, Leumi Switzerland, and Commerzbank Luxembourg. His quantum leap was the acquisition of Merrill Lynch's international private bank. The 2012 deal backed up Collardi's claim that Asia was Julius Baer's «second home market,» and reinforced its standing as a so-called pure private bank unfettered by investment banking interests.
Always restless, Collardi's 2017 departure for a partnership with Pictet in Geneva seemed an acknowledgment that he had reached the limit of how starkly he could reshape Julius Baer. In the two years hence, Collardi's ambitious growth strategy for the wealth manager has been overshadowed by several ugly scandals, most notably one involving Venezuelan oil corruption.
