Credit Suisse aims to hire 1,000 wealth managers-paper
SINGAPORE, Sept 27 (Reuters) - Swiss bank Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX) plans to hire another 1,000 relationship managers or more globally over the next three years to boost its wealth management business, an executive said in a newspaper report on Saturday. Walter Berchtold, CEO of global private banking, is looking to poach from other banks and hire corporate bankers to add to the group's 3,370 relationship managers, since there are opportunities for investors amid the credit crisis, he said in an interview published in Singapore's Business Times.
"There are short-term opportunities in the credit world. Other great opportunities are some of the stocks that are truly global players, that have great products, great distribution franchises -- that are retreating to very reasonable pricing in terms of PEs (price-to-earnings ratios)," Berchtold was quoted as saying.
"These are opportunities for people who have been holding back to make very valuable investments."
Credit Suisse (CS.N) has seen billions of credit-linked writedowns this year but has been hit by the credit crisis to a lesser degree than its larger rival UBS (UBSN.VX) and core rich clients have kept their money at the bank.
Berchtold said it was wrong to blame the way banks are structured or business models for the crisis, but instead it was the failure of risk management and decision-making. He saw the crisis ending in the first half of 2009.
"We are not out of the woods yet. The industry will have to resize itself...but this hasn't really sunk into the industry yet. We still have a lot of balance-sheet repairing," he said.
"We will slowly but surely come out of it. And then you will see a lot of activity in the financial industry, because we have a lot of new CEOs almost everywhere," he said, adding there would be a lot of M&A, restructuring on the credit side and new businesses created around the current crisis.
"There's trillions of dollars of paper floating about -- someone will take care of it, start bundling it." (Reporting by Neil Chatterjee; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
