Credit Suisse Hires Veteran Meissner to Lead New Unit Serving Wealthy Clients
October 13 2020 - 3:19PM
Dow Jones News
By Margot Patrick
Credit Suisse Group AG hired Christian Meissner, a Bank of
America Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. veteran, to head a new
unit connecting its wealthiest clients with its investment
bank.
Mr. Meissner was previously head of corporate and investment
banking at Bank of America until 2018, helping reshape the unit
after its financial-crisis merger with Merrill Lynch & Co. In
the role, he oversaw an effort to pare the corporate and investment
bank's customer roster and focus on fewer, more lucrative,
clients.
Credit Suisse said Mr. Meissner will start later this month as
co-head of international wealth-management investment banking
advisory and vice chairman of investment banking.
Credit Suisse has been reorganizing and integrating units in an
effort to pull more revenue from its rich clients by offering them
access to deals and other business handled through Credit Suisse's
investment bank. It said in July it would start the new advisory
arm. Its co-head is Babak Dastmaltschi.
Credit Suisse said it would gain Mr. Meissner's "longstanding
corporate and private-equity relationships with clients
globally."
The hire comes as competition has stiffened to bank billionaire
entrepreneurs and wealthy families, a longtime specialty of Credit
Suisse and larger rival UBS Group AG. Both banks have said the
world's rich want more access to private-market investments and
bespoke financing, and have been knitting together parts of their
wealth-management and investment-banking units to tap the
demand.
Before he joined Bank of America in 2010, Austrian-born Mr.
Meissner worked for years as an investment banker in Europe at
Goldman Sachs and at Lehman Brothers.
In July, Credit Suisse's new chief executive since February,
Thomas Gottstein, said the Swiss lender would combine most of its
fragmented trading and investment-banking businesses to free up
cash to invest in other parts of the bank. I
Swiss and European banks generally are trying to replace revenue
eroded across their businesses by persistently low or negative
interest rates. At the same time, bad loans are rising because of
the coronavirus pandemic. Credit Suisse has performed better than
some other big global banks in navigating the pandemic so far,
because of its focus on lending to households and companies in
Switzerland, and the world's wealthy.
Mr. Meissner will report to Philipp Wehle, head of international
wealth management, and to Brian Chin, head of Credit Suisse's
investment bank.
Write to Margot Patrick at margot.patrick@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 13, 2020 15:04 ET (19:04 GMT)
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