UBS will close the takeover process for Credit Suisse today, less than three months after bailing it out in a 3 billion-euro buyout deal backed by the Swiss National Bank. The new Swiss banking benchmark is now born, with assets valued at more than 1.5 trillion euros and the support of the local government, willing to assume future losses of the entity of nearly 9,300 million euros.
The process has been accompanied in recent weeks by the brain drain of Credit Suisse, which today puts an end to 167 years of history and whose brand will gradually disappear, after delisting this week in New York and Zurich. In just three months, the bank has lost nearly 2,000 employees and, apart from the planned office closures in Switzerland, has been left without some top-level managers.
The competition has taken the opportunity to wrest investment bankers and senior managers from Credit Suisse in international markets such as London, Hong Kong or Singapore. This weekend, Bloomberg reported that Santander would sign three of them, including the head of equities, Ernesto Cruz, and two other bankers specializing in derivatives and markets. With these signings, the Spanish bank has added more than a dozen large additions from the Swiss bank in recent weeks.
In a message to bank employees this weekend, Credit Suisse CEO Ulrich Koerner confirmed the acquisition would go ahead today. “Monday will not only end this chapter in history, but it will be the beginning of a promising future,†he said.
The new UBS will be led by Sergio Ermotti, who became CEO at the end of March, shortly after the Credit Suisse purchase agreement, and who has made it his goal to restore confidence in the Swiss banking system.
The country’s authorities have not only actively participated in the merger, but have also offered all kinds of guarantees to keep the benchmark for Swiss banking, a global system, on its feet. In the days of the rescue, they came to put liquidity lines on the table for more than 250,000 million euros to guarantee that the operation was closed without problems.
The operation is closed not without discomfort in Switzerland. Credit Suisse shareholders already expressed their anger at the bank’s last shareholders’ meeting, and everything related to this crisis has become a matter of maximum political and social interest, with various parties, including the Swiss Socialists, demanding a spin-off of the new entity at the risk of creating a financial mastodon.
