Credit Suisse liquidator

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They never get as close as they do on the Europaallee near Zurich’s main train station. On the one hand, the offices of UBS, on the other hand, the offices of Credit Suisse. Those working at lunch in the canteen can watch each other eat. Following the merger announcement, UBS employees posted a message in the window. It shows the letters of UBS and Credit Suisse and two outstretched hands.

A well-received gesture among CS employees. But only one sign remains. There is no transition between the right and left of the street. Meeting and meeting will continue to be prohibited until the transfer is officially completed. But the so-called closure could take weeks to arrive. From what we’ve heard, that won’t happen before the end of June.

They say everyone has a chance

A long period of time, which is especially difficult for CS employees. They don’t know if they still have a place in the “new UBS”. “The superiors try to make us happy,” says a young CS employee who did his apprenticeship at a large bank. They used to say that the new UBS would need more staff than it does now. That everyone has a chance.

No one is under any illusions as to whether this will actually happen. At Credit Suisse, executives are talking about a merger. In UBS without inheritance, takeover. “I don’t know what to believe. Sounds like liquidation to me. Credit Suisse gets put in a box and thrown away,” says the CS employee.

A sense of collective sadness blows along the entire coast. An immigrant from Sweden describes his mood as “sad”. The entrepreneurial spirit that makes Credit Suisse so different from other banks is still evident, he says. But it’s fading.

After a month everything is not clear

Even a month after CS crashed, no one knows how the integration will turn out. The only thing that is clear is that Francesca McDonagh, 47, COO of the big bank, is building an integration team. Your colleague at UBS is Mike Dargan (45), Head of Digital and IT.

McDonagh only joined CS in October from the Bank of Ireland. Still hired by Thomas Gottstein (59), he would initially run the European business. But when Ulrich Körner (60) became boss, he put him in charge of the major renovation. The mountaineer, who managed to reach Oxford from the Irish provinces, was once described by the London Financial Times as “screaming and shouting”.

She didn’t bully or yell when she attended a major in-house event last week. But he couldn’t say much either because important decisions have not been made yet. It is not yet clear what the future operating model of the new bank will be.

The question is whether UBS will continue to be divided into four divisions or whether the structure of the bank will be more regionally adjusted. This is a decision that UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti (62) must make. He is expected to comment on the matter next Tuesday.

Stop on all future projects

Only when the new structure is clear can McDonagh begin integration and break up the merger project into individual project teams across lines of business or at the country level. Then it will quickly become clear who belongs and who does not.

Being part of an integration project team is the hope of many CS workers. Also for a Swiss IT project manager. The project was shelved shortly after the merger announcement. It assumes that this will remain the case. He thinks he will be fired if he cannot join the integration team.

Many employees are like him. According to several sources, CS has frozen all future projects. As you can read in a presentation from the summer of 2022, the bank spends CHF 1.1 billion on new projects every year. It is estimated that more than 5000 jobs are financed by this. As a precaution, the Swiss IT project manager sent his resume to a recruiter. Hundreds of CS employees must have done the same. “Everyone should call themselves,” he says.

Employees residing deep in the engine room have temporary job security. They manage 90,000 workstations, more than 100,000 servers, 37,000 relational databases and 3,000 applications in 13 data centers worldwide. Hardware and software also need to run smoothly during the transition phase.

Source :Blick