Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse's founder, Alfred Escher, was called "the spiritual father of the railway law of 1852", for his work defeating the idea of a state-run railway system in Switzerland in favor of privatization.[13][14] Escher founded Credit Suisse (originally called the Swiss Credit Institution, i.e., Schweizerische Kreditanstalt) jointly with Allgemeine Deutsche Credit-Anstalt in 1856[15] primarily to provide domestic funding to railway projects, avoiding French banks that wanted to exert influence over the railway system.[16] Escher aimed to start the company with three million shares and instead sold 218 million shares in three days.[17] The bank was modeled after Crédit Mobilier, a bank funding railway projects in France that was founded two years prior, except Credit Suisse had a more conservative lending policy focused on short-to-medium term loans.[16] In its first year of operation, 25 percent of the bank's revenues was from the Swiss Northeastern Railway, which was being built by Escher's company, Nordostbahn.[18]

Share of the Schweizerische Kreditanstalt in Zurich, issued 31 May 1898

Swiss Credit Institution's headquarters, 1895.

Credit Suisse played a substantial role in the economic development of Switzerland, helping the country develop its currency system,[17] funding entrepreneurs[14] and investing in the Gotthard railway, which connected Switzerland to the European rail system in 1882.[16] Credit Suisse helped fund the creation of Switzerland's electrical grid through its participation with Elektrobank (now called Elektrowatt), a coalition of organizations that co-financed Switzerland's electrical grid.[19] According to The Handbook on the History of European Banks, "Switzerland's young electricity industry came to assume the same importance as support for railway construction 40 years earlier."[16] The bank also helped fund the effort to disarm and imprison French troops that crossed into Swiss borders in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.[16][18] By the end of the war, Credit Suisse had become the largest bank in Switzerland.[17]

Throughout the late 1800s, Credit Suisse set up banking and insurance companies in Germany, Brussels, Geneva and others (as SKA International) with the bank as a shareholder of each company. It created insurance companies like Swiss RE, Swiss Life, Rentenanstalt, and Schweiz. Credit Suisse had its first unprofitable year in 1886, due to losses in agriculture, venture investments, commodities, and international trade. The bank created its own sugar beet factory, bought 25,000 shares in animal breeding ventures and supported an export business, Schweizerische Exportgesellschaft, that experienced heavy losses for over-speculative investing.[16][18]

The inside of a Credit Suisse building in the 1930s

In the early 1900s Credit Suisse began catering to consumers and the middle-class with deposit counters, currency exchanges and savings accounts.[18] The first branch outside of Zürich was opened in 1905 in Basel.[14] The bank helped companies affected by World War I restructuring, and extended loans for reconstruction efforts.[16][20] During the 1920s depression, net profits and dividends were halved and employees took salary cuts.[21] After World War II, a substantial portion of Credit Suisse's business was in foreign reconstruction efforts.[21] Holocaust survivors had problems trying to retrieve assets from relatives that died in concentration camps without death certificates.[22] This led to a class action lawsuit in 1996[23] that settled in 2000 for $1.25 billion.[24][25][26][27] The Agreement on the Swiss Banks' Code of Conduct with Regard to the Exercise of Due Diligence was created in the 1970s,[14] after a Credit Suisse branch in Chiasso was exposed for illegally funneling $900 million in Italian deposits to speculative investments.[28]

A logo from 1972

In 1978, White, Weld & Company dropped its partnership with Credit Suisse after it was bought by Merrill Lynch. To replace the partnership with White, Credit Suisse partnered with First Boston to create Credit Suisse First Boston in Europe and bought a 44 percent stake in First Boston's US operations.[29]
In 1987, the Group acquired the blue chip London stockbrokers Buckmaster & Moore. Originally established by Irish aristocrat Charles Armytage-Moore and sportsman Walter Buckmaster, who had met at Repton School. As stockbrokers they were very well connected, had developed a good private client business, which at one time included John Maynard Keynes.
Other Credit Suisse First Boston brands were later created in Switzerland, Asia, London, New York and Tokyo.[30][31] According to an article in The New York Times, First Boston became "the superstar of the Euromarkets" by buying stakes in American companies that wanted to issue bonds.[31] In 1988 First Boston loaned $487 million to Gibbons and Green for the purchase of the Ohio Mattress Company, which was purchased at twenty times its annual revenue. Gibbons had also borrowed $475 million in junk bonds. When the junk bonds market crashed the following year, Gibbons couldn't repay First Boston.[17] Credit Suisse injected $725 million to keep First Boston in business,[32] which ultimately led to the company being taken over by Credit Suisse. This became known as the "burning bed" deal, because the Federal Reserve overlooked the Glass–Steagall Act that requires separation between commercial and investment banks in order to preserve the stability of the financial markets.[17]

Credit Suisse headquarters as of 2009

In the late 1990s, Credit Suisse executed an aggressive acquisition strategy.[14] The bank acquired Bank Leu, known as Switzerland's oldest bank, in 1990.[33][34] In 1993 Credit Suisse outbid UBS for a controlling stake in Switzerland's fifth largest bank, Swiss Volksbank in a $1.1 billion deal.[35] It also merged with Winterthur Group in 1997 for about $9 billion[36] and acquired the asset management division of Warburg, Pincus & Co. in 1999 for $650 million.[37] Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was purchased for $11.5 billion in 2000.[14][38]

In 1996, Credit Suisse restructured as the Credit Suisse Group with four divisions: Credit Suisse Volksbank (later called Credit Suisse Bank) for domestic banking, Credit Suisse Private Banking, Credit Suisse Asset Management, and Credit Suisse First Boston for corporate and investment banking. The restructure was expected to cost the company $800 million and result in 7,000 lost jobs, but save $560 million a year.[39][40] While Credit Suisse First Boston had been struggling, Credit Suisse's overall profits had grown 20 percent over the prior year, reaching $664 million.[39] In 1999 Japan's Financial Supervisory Agency temporarily suspended the financial-products division's license to operate in Japan for "window dressing", the practice of selling derivatives that are often used by bank clients to hide losses.[41]

Credit Suisse on the Zürich Paradeplatz

In the 2000s, Credit Suisse executed a series of restructures. In 2002 the bank was consolidated into two entities: Credit Suisse First Boston for investments and Credit Suisse Financial Services. A third unit was added in 2004 for insurance.[14] Credit Suisse restructured again in 2004 under what it calls the "one bank" model. Under the restructuring, every board had a mix of executives from all three divisions. It also changed the compensation and commission models to encourage cross-division referrals and created a "solution partners" group that functions between the investment and private banking divisions.[42] Following the restructure Credit Suisse's private banking division grew 19 percent per year despite the economic crisis. The firm bumped long-time rival UBS off the number one position in Euromoney's private banking poll.[42] In 2006, Credit Suisse acknowledged misconduct for helping Iran and other countries hide transactions from US authorities and paid a $536 million settlement.[43][44] The same year it merged Bank Leu AG, Clariden Holding AG, Bank Hofmann AG and BGP Banca di Gestione Patrimoniale into a new company called Clariden Leu.[45]

The increasing importance of sustainability and the related commitments and liabilities of international standards such as the UNGC, of which the bank is a member, lead to increasingly sophisticated and ambitious risk management over the years. Credit Suisse operates a process which since 2007 uses RepRisk, a Swiss provider of ESG Risk analytics and metrics, to screen and evaluate environmental and social risks of risky transactions and due diligence.[46]

In 2009, Yellowstone Club founder Tim Blixseth sued Credit Suisse when the bank attempted to collect on $286 million in loan debt during Yellowstone's bankruptcy proceedings.[47] The debtor had borrowed more than $300 million for the business, but used a large portion of it for personal use before eventually filing for bankruptcy.[48] Four lawsuits were filed from other resorts seeking $24 billion in damages alleging Credit Suisse created loans with the intention of taking over their properties upon default.[49]

According to The Wall Street Journal, "Credit Suisse survived the credit crisis better than many competitors."[44] Credit Suisse had $902 million in writedowns for subprime holdings and the same amount for leveraged loans,[50] but it did not have to borrow from the government.[51] Along with other banks, Credit Suisse was investigated and sued by US authorities for bundling mortgage loans with securities, misrepresenting the risks of underlying mortgages during the housing boom.[52][53] Following the crisis, Credit Suisse cut more than one-trillion in assets and made plans to cut its investment banking arm 37 percent by 2014. It reduced emphasis on investment banking and focused on private banking and wealth management.[54][55] In July 2011, Credit Suisse cut 2,000 jobs in response to a weaker than expected economic recovery[56] and later merged its asset management with the private bank group to cut additional costs.[57]

We sell [bank] safety not bank secrecy. Being a safe haven in a world that is becoming increasingly dangerous and volatile is no bad place to be.

— Tidjane Thiam, chief executive of Credit Suisse, in a 2018 interview with the Bloomberg Markets[58]

A series of international investigations took place in the early 2000s regarding the use banking secrecy in Credit Suisse accounts for tax evasion. The Brazilian government investigated 13 former and current Credit Suisse employees in 2008.[14] The investigation led to arrests that year and in 2009 as part of a larger crackdown in Brazil.[59][60] Four Credit Suisse bankers were accused of fraud by the US Justice Department in 2011 for helping wealthy Americans avoid taxes.[61][62] German authorities found that citizens were using insurance policies of a Bermuda-based Credit Suisse subsidiary to earn tax-free interest.[63] In November 2012, Credit Suisse's asset management division was merged with the private banking arm.[64] In September 2012, the Swiss government gave banks like Credit Suisse permission to provide information to the US Justice Department for tax evasion probes.[65] In February 2014 it agreed to pay a fine of $197 million after one of its businesses served 8,500 US clients without registering its activities, leading to suspicion as to whether it was helping Americans evade taxes. It was one of 14 Swiss banks under investigation.[66] Separately, in 2013, German authorities began to probe Credit Suisse, its private bank subsidiary Clariden Leu, and its regional subsidiary Neue Aargauer Bank for helping German citizens evade taxes.[67] The bank eventually entered into a €150 million settlement with the government.[68]

In March 2014, Credit Suisse denied claims it had been drawn into a Swiss competition probe investigating potential collusion to manipulate foreign exchange rates by various Swiss and foreign banks.[69] In May 2014, Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion. It was the most prominent bank to plead guilty in the United States since Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1989 and the largest to do so since the Bankers Trust in 1999.[70] "Credit Suisse conspired to help U.S. citizens hide assets in offshore accounts in order to evade paying taxes. When a bank engages in misconduct this brazen, it should expect that the Justice Department will pursue criminal prosecution to the fullest extent possible, as has happened here," Attorney General Eric H. Holder said at the time.[71] Holder also said "This case shows that no financial institution, no matter its size or global reach, is above the law." Credit Suisse shares rose 1% on the day the $2.6 billion penalty was announced.[72]

On 10 March 2015, it was announced that Tidjane Thiam, the CEO of Prudential would leave to become the next CEO of Credit Suisse.[73] In September 2016, Brian Chin was appointed Chief Executive of Global Markets and joined the executive board of the bank. At this time, it was also announced that Eric M. Varvel was appointed president and CEO of Credit Suisse Holdings (USA).[74]

Since the financial crisis in 2008 share prices of Credit Suisse and other Swiss banks including UBS have remained mostly stagnant or flat. This is seen as a result of the aftermath of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which caused a large loss in consumer and market participant trust and confidence in the banking industry. The loss in confidence is reflected in the large loss of share prices across the Swiss banking sector after 2008, which have never recovered (and possibly never will) to pre-financial crisis levels.[75]

On 23 August 2019, Credit Suisse announced the formation of a new "direct banking" business unit under their Switzerland division (Swiss Universal Bank, SUB), focusing on digital retail products. The step is seen as a reaction to the emergence of FinTech competitors such as N26 or Revolut in Switzerland and shall help to better attract young clients.[76] In July 2020, Thomas Gottstein, the new CEO of the company, announced restructuring; it was influenced as a result of the trading surge in Q2 of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The planned restructuring is set to "to reduce costs and improve efficiencies" and features some reverts of alterations brought by the previous CEO, Thiam. According to Gottstein, "These initiatives should also help to provide resilience in uncertain markets and deliver further upside when more positive economic conditions prevail."[77]

In 2007, two Credit Suisse traders pleaded guilty to mismarking their securities positions to overvalue them by $3 billion, avoid losses, and increase their year-end bonuses.[98][99][100] Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that the traders' goal was to obtain lavish year-end bonuses that the mismarking would lead to.[101][102] The traders engaged in what The New York Times called "a brazen scheme to artificially increase the price of bonds on their books to create fictitious profits".[98] A team of traders, facing an inquiry from Credit Suisse's internal controls Price Testing group, justified their bond portfolio's inflated value by obtaining "independent" marks from other banks' trading desks.[98][103] The traders secured sham "independent" marks for illiquid securities that they held position in from friends who worked at other financial firms.[102][98][103] Their friends generated prices that valued a number of bonds at the prices that the traders requested, which the traders then recorded as the true value of the bonds.[98][103] The bank was not charged in the case.[98] Credit Suisse's outside auditor discovered the mismarkings during an audit.[104] Credit Suisse took a $2.65 billion write-down after discovering their traders' mismarking.[102]

On December 16, 2009, it was announced that the U.S. Dept. of Justice reached a settlement with Credit Suisse over accusations that the bank assisted residents of International Emergency Economic Powers Act sanctioned countries to wire money in violation of the Act as well as New York law from 1995 to 2006. The settlement resulted in Credit Suisse forfeiting $536 million.[105]

On 5 July 2018, Credit Suisse agreed to pay a $47 million fine to the US Department of Justice and $30 million to resolve charges of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC's investigation said that the banking group sought banking-investment business in the Asia-Pacific region by hiring and promoting more than one hundred Chinese officials and related people in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.[106][107]

Credit Suisse invests in fossil fuels, including coal-fired power stations.

In November 2018, about a dozen climate activists played tennis inside Credit Suisse agencies (of Lausanne, Geneva and Basel simultaneously), disrupting operations as a protest against the bank's investments in fossil fuels.[108][109] Credit Suisse lodged a complaint and the activists from Lausanne were tried in January 2020 and fined 21,600 CHF. They were later cleared of all charges in what a Swiss media outlet considered a 'historical decision'.[110][111][108][109][112]

The tennis theme was chosen to urge Swiss tennis star Roger Federer to break his connection with Credit Suisse as a sponsor due to the company's participating in what activists described as the climate crisis (notably by multiplying 16-fold its financing for coal from 2016 to 2017).[108][109] On 11 January 2020, Federer published a statement saying: "[...] I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the youth climate movement, and I am grateful to young climate activists for pushing us all to examine our behaviours", and further committed to a dialogue with his sponsors on social issues.[113]

On 24 January 2020, following the trial, the climate activist group emitted a press statement requesting a transparent, televised debate with the CEO of Credit Suisse. With no answer from the bank, they created a website under the name "DiscreditSuisse" hosting content pertaining to Credit Suisse's record on climate issues.[114]

Hong Kong police have begun investigations regarding $250 million in Credit Suisse branch deposits in Hong Kong linked to former Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak and Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB).[115] Reuters reported that "Swiss financial watchdog FINMA ... had conducted "extensive investigations" into Credit Suisse's dealings surrounding 1MDB".[116][117]