The former chairman of Credit Suisse is partnering in a new cyber venture, finews.com has learned.
After leaving Credit Suisse three months ago, Urs Rohner relinquished all his finance-related mandates, including those at the Institute of International Finance and European Banking Group.
He left behind him a bank on its knees and became a glaring example of incompetence and greed in the financial sector, as finews.com wrote in May, drawing criticism from the otherwise discreet and reserved Swiss banking community.
Since then, he has taken a job advising Investcorp, a $35-billion, Bahrain-based asset manager, after quietly taking up office space in Zurich’s upscale Seefeld neighborhood with his one-man freelancing firm (U. Rohner & Co. AG).
From Financial to Tech Services
Rohner is also a founding partner in Vega Cyber Associates, a Zug-based limited company set up earlier this year for «technology services and development of all types of products for technology and security». Rohner’s name doesn’t appear in the commercial register for Vega, but is listed in his biography for Investcorp.
The company’s sole managerial representative is Pascal Oehri, an associate at white-collar law firm Wenger & Vieli. It isn’t clear what Vega, which was set up with just 100,000 Swiss francs ($110,000) in capital, plans to do exactly. Neither Oehri nor Rohner responded to requests for comment.
Digital Proponent
Rohner's dip into the cybersecurity world comes as no surprise. He was an early, fierce proponent of digitization while at Credit Suisse. The Swiss bank launched CSX, a hybrid between online start-up financial apps and a bank branch, late in his tenure. That was aimed as a response to international apps such as Revolut as well as to homegrown projects such as Neon or Yuh.
Credit Suisse's share price slid 70 percent in the decade of Rohner's chairmanship. The Swiss lawyer, who handed Credit Suisse's burgeoning problems as well as a crisis response committee to successor António Horta-Osório in April, is independently wealthy, having pulled down more than 34 million francs in pay from the Swiss bank since 2011.
