He is a major figure in some of the biggest deals and scandals in Swiss banking in the last three decades – from behind the scenes. finews.com looks at how David Solo is still a central figure in the alpine nation’s finance industry.

«Phantom of the media»: David Solo earned the nickname at UBS, where as a shy 32-year-old computer scientist he first emerged as a force as operating chief of SBC Warburg, the prestigious British merchant bank. He had Marcel Ospel, the architect of the 1995 deal between the two, to thank for his meteoric rise.

Ospel and Solo’s paths diverged in 2005: Solo headed for Julius Baer as part of UBS’ sale of three private banks and asset manager GAM. But it put him on track for a C-suite career in Swiss finance that continues to this day: Solo is co-founder and chairman of a Credit Suisse-backed boutique which builds quantitative solutions based on physics, deep learning, and behavioral finance.

Tight With UBS Backer

Now 55, Solo «would do everything to prevent this profile from being written,» as one person who has worked with him put it. He is intensely private: Despite running a blue-chip firm (GAM) for years, he appears to have last spoken to a media outlet in 1995, to the «Financial Times» while at UBS.

He kept tight with Ospel, who died earlier this year: Solo joined other acolytes of the UBS patron including Marco Suter for an annual sojourn to Klosters, where the group would rent a chalet together, several sources familiar with the matter told finews.com.

«He is extremely direct and blunt, which wrong-footed some people who worked with him,» one person who reported to him said. Combined with his «brutally smart» mind and swift decision-making, Solo was perceived by some as cool to the point of compassionless.

Squirming Under Scrutiny

Others laud his knowledge and expertise, passion, and decisiveness: «You always know where you stood with him,» according to another person who worked with him. His longest professional interval was at asset manager GAM, which he ran from 2005 when UBS sold it to Julius Baer.

Solo oversaw one-quarter of Julius Baer’s assets following the deal. In 2009, the wealth manager spun out GAM as a publicly-listed company – with Solo as CEO of the operating company (he added CEO of the holding in 2013).

For portfolio managers at GAM – no shrinking violets or intellectual slouches – Solo could be imposing. Some squirmed as Solo, who understood the nitty-gritty of their investments, probed them on their strategies, according to sources at GAM.

MIT Lab Days

By all accounts, Solo is brilliant: he earned a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and researched at two labs associated with the prestigious private technology university (one on machine-optimized search algorithms and one on a type of fiberoptic communications systems used in military settings).

A father to two children and now based on the U.S. east coast, Solo is also solidly nerdy: «He would read something about an exotic area of finance and want to spend the whole meeting discussing that,» one person who worked with him for several years said. Solo's habit of avoiding handshakes – years before the coronavirus pandemic – exacerbated his perceived aloofness.

UBS' Cleaner-Upper

He came to UBS by way of O’Connor & Associates, where he was a partner. UBS’ predecessor bank snapped up the Chicago based derivatives boutique in 1991. After meeting Ospel during that deal, Solo became a key adviser and strategist to the UBS veteran.

Ospel made him operating chief of Warburg, then in 1998 risk chief, where Solo cleared the wreckage from UBS’ 950 million Swiss franc ($1 billion) LTCM foray. He did another clean-up job in UBS’ private equity book, before co-founding DCI, a quantitative asset manager in San Francisco, in 2004.

By the following year, he was back at UBS, helping Ospel and a team of Goldman Sachs bankers who led the sale of the private banks to Julius Baer; Solo emerged as head of GAM, which managed 66 billion at the time.

Meaningful Introduction

There, his tenure was largely successful, though mired in criticism of opaque pay schemes by proxy shareholder groups. The pay issue aside, his leadership was uneventful – until four years after it ended in 2014.

Solo, who holds dual Swiss and American citizenship, surfaced as the man who introduced GAM portfolio manager Tim Haywood to Lex Greensill, a supply chain financier. The introduction set into motion a chain of events that GAM is still struggling to recover from.

No Part of Public Life

People who have worked for him note that Solo wasn’t afraid to lead – something which presumably endeared him to the mercurial Ospel. If Solo was central in several major episodes in Swiss finance including the 1997 mega-merger which formed UBS, he wanted no part of public life.

Before becoming CEO of GAM as a stand-alone company, he was happy to work behind the scenes for other bosses including Hans de Gier and (briefly) Boris Collardi. His aversion to publicity would have been accentuated from watching Ospel go from the savior of Swiss banking to disgrace in 2008.