Credit Suisse’s Taiwan coverage team is one the market’s largest and best established, delivering in-depth market insights and financial clarity in a time of global uncertainty.
Raw data underlines the value of the Swiss lender – overseen by its head of private banking for North Asia, Francois Monnet – to Taiwan and vice versa. Assets under management in its onshore private banking division rose by double digits in percentage terms year on year in 2019 as did its net revenue, despite a tepid industry environment and global concerns, even pre-Covid-19, over global growth and regional trade frictions.
Credit Suisse’s success is built around its regional and global strength and reinforced by the depth of its domestic coverage. It reckons that between them, its relationship managers bank 55% of the dollar billionaires on Forbes’ Taiwan list.
The bank implicitly understands that private banking in Taiwan has two heads. The first faces out, to the wealth generated by local entrepreneurs but stored overseas. The other faces inward and focuses on helping to manage the wealth generated and stored onshore by family-owned businesses and entrepreneurs.
The bank is an innovator, too. When a number of clients came to it last year in search of ways to temper their exposure to market volatility, Credit Suisse’s answer was to roll out a range of smart structured products, including promissory notes on funds and equities that helped customers to hedge against further falls in asset and equity prices, while letting them take part in any subsequent upside gains.
In 2019, Credit Suisse further bolstered its integrated banking platform, thanks to the launch of its Asia Trading Solutions unit, which brought together under one roof its regional markets and private banking solutions teams, and its Asia Pacific Financing group.
The latter extends customized solutions to a range of high-end clients, including ultra-high net-worths, entrepreneurs, corporates and sovereign and institutional clients.