Saxo Bank Switzerland’s new chairman is Andreas Amschwand. The veteran trader tells finews.com how he wants to make the online bank a haven for clients that don’t feel at home in a world crammed with cookie-cutter mandates.
Saxo Bank Switzerland, as others, made headway during 2020 dominated by the pandemic. The local branch of the Chinese-owned Danish bank announced Tuesday that trading volume jumped 50 percent last year, while the number of active clients was up an even higher 57 percent.
Net profit rose more than tenfold, reaching 11.4 million Swiss francs. Large investments made in the bank’s trading platform, however, weighed down results a year earlier.
Bearing Fruit
But Saxo Bank wants to profit from those investments this year as well. «We didn’t see any delays in onboarding clients in the first quarter despite high volumes,» Andreas Amschwand said in an interview with finews.com.
«We are now in a position to manage the business on a large scale.»
It was last April when Amschwand, then vice-chairman, took over the full chairmanship. Saxo Bank Switzerland is led by CEO Renato Santi.
Changing Direction
It is a new era for Saxo Bank. Amschwand, 61, looks back on a long and illustrious career in banking. For a quarter of a century, he served UBS as a trader, rising to head of FX, with his last position at the wealth manager being Global Head of Investment Products & Services. Between 2012 and 2018, he sat on Julius Baer’s Board of Directors.
At Saxo, he seems himself clearly as a strategist. «I very consciously focus only on strategy and do not interfere with daily operations. I spend about 90 percent of my time making sure that our strategy is being implemented. »
Young and Wealthy
His focus is on ‹investment clients› and not the bank’s traditional mainstay of trading clients. They are ‹affluent› clients having between 100,000 and 3 million Swiss francs in investable assets. Many of them are below 40, according to Amschwand.
The takeover of Geneva-based Strateo clients announced last December has helped grow the segment faster than others at Saxo.
Pushed Into Discretionary Mandates
These clients don’t want to be talked down to while their small trading volumes are not particularly welcome at the major Swiss banks. They are frequently pushed into discretionary mandates that provide stable earnings to wealth managers. «We have noticed that execution-only clients often get second class treatment and they are not really strategically relevant or important for many wealth managers,» Amschwand says.
«Naturally clients do not like that and that helps them shift to our platform.» The new chairman thinks they are Saxo’s ideal clients. He is confident that their automated platform allows them to fully and profitably service them.
Trading Cryptocurrencies
Saxo’s digital technology can also serve as a white-label platform for external wealth managers – and Amschwand intends to push this business strongly. «Independent asset managers are being forced to offer digital services because of client pressure.»
He plans a crypto-currency brokerage arm in the third quarter of this year. Saxo will directly trade the most important crypto-currencies against the US dollar, Yen and Euro - followed by the Swiss franc in a later phase.
Seba Departure
Amschwand has extensive experience in crypto. In 2018 he became chairman of Zuger Fintech Seba, which won the first crypto-license in Switzerland in 2019 together with competitor Sygnum – although he left surprisingly and suddenly last July.
From his current position as Saxo chairman, he expects markets to be relatively quiet in the second quarter of 2021.
«Volumes are still higher than they were a year earlier,» he observes. He does not expect a radical shift. «As long as interest rates remain low, activity in equity markets will stay high – there are so few investment alternatives».
