[b]The gentleman from Côte d'Ivoire is managing old/established wealth.



Suisse Beats
Credit Suisse’s new boss is a reluctant African role model

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The Man from Credit Suisse.(Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann)
Tidjane Thiam, just named CEO of Credit Suisse, has a line he once fed a headhunter: “I am happy to interview. But you need to tell them you found someone who’s black, African, Francophone, and 6ft 4.”

He landed the job, a senior-management gig at Aviva, the British insurer, and rose quickly through the ranks. After six years, he left to become CFO of Prudential in the UK in 2008. A year later: he was CEO.

An Ivory Coast native, Thiam’s ascension to the top job at Credit Suisse, the seventh largest investment bank in the world, is noteworthy. Unlike say executives of Indian or Chinese origin, there are next to no first-generation black African role models at the very top of global businesses. Corporate America has been a tougher maze to navigate for both Africans and African Americans. There are currently just five African American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

Thiam admits to being a little uncomfortable with the focus on his race. But as the first black person to head a FTSE 100 company in the UK and now the first black person to head a major European bank, he also recognizes the reality of his privileged position—and the reality of racism.

“I avoid talking about it because I don’t think it’s very helpful. [The UK] has been a wonderfully welcoming place for me,” he said in an interview on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs in 2012. But “in every society in every place there are people who are not necessarily open minded and constructive.”

His resume is impeccable: Besides several years running the UK’s largest insurance firm in Prudential, he is an outstanding academic who attended some of France’s best schools. He hails from a well-connected Ivorian family and has work experience from McKinsey, the World Bank, and a stint as an Ivorian government minister. In 2000, he was invited by former president Laurent Gbagbo to be his prime minister. He declined.

In business, it hasn’t been all plain-sailing, particularly with his botched attempt to takeover AIA, an Asian life insurance firm in a deal valued at $35 billion, which would have been Britain’s largest ever rights issue. His company was fined £30 milion by regulators for not disclosing their plan early enough.

But Thiam overcame that dark period in his career and bounced back with strong profit growth in last two years. That is why investors in Prudential and Credit Suisse had markedly different reactions to the news of his appointment. Prudential lost £1.3 billion ($1.7 billion) in value on the news while Credit Suisse gained 2.9 billion Swiss francs ($3 billion) in value today, according to FactSet.

The swing in value under Thiam’s watch totaled $4.7 billion.

http://qz.com/359732/credit-suisses-new-boss-is-a-reluctant-african-role-model/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidjane_Thiam

Born 29 July 1962 (age 52)[1]
Côte d'Ivoire
Citizenship Ivorian
French
Alma mater École Polytechnique
École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris
INSEAD
Salary £8,656,000 (total compensation, 2013)[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_Suisse

Founded 1856; 159 years ago

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Credit Suisse’s choice of Thiam is refreshing
Patrick Jenkins, Financial Editor

Bank will benefit from Asia and wealth management expertise


It is the second big bank within a fortnight to appoint a chief executive — Credit Suisse’s leadership overhaul on Tuesday follows a similarly long-awaited rejig at Standard Chartered 12 days earlier. It is tempting to think the headhunters got their files mixed up.

Tidjane Thiam, named to succeed Brady Dougan as Credit Suisse chief executive, would have been a more obvious choice for StanChart, which focuses on emerging markets. He has turned the UK’s Prudential insurance group into an Asian powerhouse (though bizarrely, according to people involved, he was never sounded out for the StanChart role). Bill Winters, who will replace Peter Sands at the emerging markets bank, is an investment banking expert, just the kind of person you might line up to sort out Credit Suisse’s underperforming securities and advisory operation.

But the flipped choices are refreshing. For once, a bank has spurned a list of the usual suspects — and is being rewarded. Credit Suisse’s appointment of Mr Thiam, an insurance executive with no background in banking, has sparked an overwhelmingly positive reaction. Witness the share price, up nearly 7 per cent on Tuesday.

Credit Suisse has underperformed for years, in part because it has been less radical than others — notably local rival UBS — in unwinding its investment banking strategy in the aftermath of the financial crisis. Mr Dougan, who spent 17 years building that investment banking business before taking over as group chief executive in 2007, was never going to kill his baby.

There is widespread speculation that this is exactly what Mr Thiam, known for being clear-headed and ruthless in his strategic execution, will do.

People who have talked to the new CEO say he is reserving judgment, with all options possible. But in truth, such a radical overhaul is unlikely. For one thing, say strategic advisers, ditching the investment banking operation through a spin-off, for example, would not only be risky; it would cause ructions with regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, given the uncertainties around creating a freestanding investment bank. It would also remove a potentially important part of the group’s rationale. Even UBS, for all its retrenchment from investment banking, is still a sizeable presence in the market. There is a large grey area of revenue to be gained from linking investment banking deals to wealth clients and from selling those clients hedging products to mitigate their business risks.
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Dramatic gestures are not, in any case, Mr Thiam’s style. Over his six years at the Pru, he managed to triple the share price by being focused, rather than radical. He succeeded in Asia, already a strong business for the Pru, by reallocating resources from an underperforming UK business.

At Credit Suisse, investment banking is likely to be the equivalent of the Pru’s UK business — a unit from which resources can be diverted. Private banking and wealth management are twice as profitable as investment banking, generating a return on capital of 16 per cent last year. With a new cost-focused CEO in charge, that can only improve.

Lex
A change will do you good

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At first sight, it looks like an odd choice. Tidjane Thiam, the man from the Pru, is to replace Brady Dougan at Credit Suisse.

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Mr Thiam will instead want to home in on what he knows — Asia on the one hand; wealth management on the other. The Pru’s asset management business, M&G, is the closest proxy for the latter. Its external assets under management have doubled over the past five years. Credit Suisse’s wealth management franchise is already growing fast in Asia. Linking it more effectively to the investment bank, as UBS does, could make it a powerful machine.

If the strategic shift of direction away from capital-intensive investment banking and towards lower-cost wealth management assets is decisive enough, it may also resolve the other big question mark hanging over Credit Suisse — whether it has enough capital to satisfy regulators. Of course, as at StanChart, where Mr Winters is widely expected to launch a rights issue to buffer a restructuring exercise, a cash call may be needed as well as an altered strategy.

Whatever Mr Thiam ends up doing, it will be worth watching. A black francophone insurer, entering the conservative cloister of Zurich’s banking community, will not go unnoticed. But he will fit in far better than sceptics might suggest. He is a decent German speaker. And despite his inexperience as a banker, he is proud of the work he did as a McKinsey consultant, installing JPMorgan’s innovative value-at-risk financial control system. One person who worked with him during a recent stint as chairman of the Association of British Insurers describes him as “one of these relatively rare people who combine substance and charisma”. His new job could mark a turning point, not just for Credit Suisse but for the broader world of banking.

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[/b]

worth celebrating and watching

What is he doing for Africa?

^google is your friend