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Reyl, Landolt & Cie, Bank am Bellevue: three Swiss private banks sold to foreign owners in six months. The crisis is whetting buyer appetite, but only a specific type of buyer is biting.

François Reyl is jubilant: «We look forward to building lasting ties with our new colleagues and to tackling all future challenges and opportunities working as a fully integrated team,» the CEO of Geneva's Reyl said on Monday, following the bank's acquisition by Intesa Sanpaolo for an undisclosed sum.

The celebratory tone is ironic: normally, a founder's son selling the eponymous, 47-year-old family bank – and its 13 billion Swiss francs ($14 billion) in assets – would be mark a sad day. Reyl's father, Dominique Reyl, founded the Geneva firm in 1973 and presides its board to this day.

Offshore Attraction

Intesa wants to use Reyl to form the basis of its wealth management ambitions out of Switzerland. The alpine nation's status as an offshore center is still hugely attractive to private banks – the Italian lender is far from alone in this school of thought.

Last year, Luxembourg's Quintet snapped up Bank am Bellevue, a minor player in wealth management by assets, but one which crucially already possessed a banking license in Switzerland. In July, Oddo BHF, the Franco-German banking group, and Landolt & Cie, a private bank based in Neuchâtel, said they were merging.

Raft Of Departures

The wave of mergers in recent months is whetting buyer appetites for Switzerland again – and most of those buyers are foreign. This contrasts with an exodus in the wake of the 2008/09 financial crisis, when foreign banks upped sticks. More than 42 Swiss subsidiaries of foreign banks were sold since 2012, according to data from KPMG – 19 of those were snapped up by domestic players, according to the consulting firm.

The largest of those were Merrill Lynch's sale of its international private bank to Julius Baer; U.S. bank Morgan Stanley and British houses Lloyds Bank and Coutts as well as various Israeli and German institutes – like Commerzbank and Dresdner Bank – also pulled their Swiss arms during the exodus.

Most banks have more than enough on their plates with rising pandemic-induced loan defaults and shielding their business from attackers like Revolut to worry about getting back into a business with its best days behind. What's underpinning the comeback of foreign banks to Switzerland? 

Goldman Sachs' Vision