swisspartners sees the future in the comprehensive financial services business and adapts its structure on target

Recent trend in independent Wealth Management clearly points towards comprehensive financial services. With this in mind, swisspartners has successfully expanded its business model over the past few years and has now also adapted the company’s organisational structure to the new requirements and procedures. Consequently, swisspartners can now tap into growth opportunities more efficiently.

Zurich, July 13, 2017 – The waiver of bank secrecy, tightened regulatory provisions, increased invest-ment market demands and growing competitive pressure have gradually led to declining margins for the traditional Independent Asset Managers. Furthermore, both private and institutional clients increasingly favour financial service providers offering a comprehensive spectrum of services.

swisspartners has perceived this trend early on and has been for years successfully expanding into com-plementary business activities. In addition to traditional Wealth Management, the areas of national and international trust business, as well as unit-linked insurance solutions have been deliberately developed. In January 2017, this strategy was further enhanced by the merger of the fiduciary business of swis-spartners with that of Marcuard Heritage. In the meantime, with assets under management of well over 4.5 billion Swiss francs, 1’600 client relationships, 95 employees and locations in Zurich, Geneva, Feld-kirch, Vaduz and a representative office in Madrid, the swisspartners Group has reached a size that requires a new organisational structure that is conducive to achieving further growth more efficiently.

For this reason, all activities have been systematically allocated to the three business areas of asset management, trust business and insurance. In addition, a service, respectively, operations centre was set up in order to provide centrally in-house services such as, infrastructure, processes and support, which also allows for a more equitable cost attribution. With the new organisation, the individual busi-ness segments and their processes can be better aligned with the needs of the clients. Moreover, each business area can adapt individually and, thus more efficiently, to the regulatory requirements.

In conjunction with the new orientation, a number of adaptations took place also on the top manage-ment level. As of the end of September 2017, the Management Board of the swisspartners Group will be dissolved and replaced by the Group Management Board, which will be responsible for the overall stra-tegic transformation of the Group in accordance with the provisions of Board of Directors. The following persons will constitute the executive leadership: Markus Wintsch (CEO, as hitherto), Christ J. Collenberg (Wealth Structuring, as hitherto), Marc Sahli (CFO, new) and Kristian Bader (Operations and Projects, as hitherto). The leadership of the Asset Management division is still to be decided upon.

At the Annual General Meeting in May 2018, the Board of Directors will propose to the shareholders that Markus Wintsch be elected to the Board of Directors. He is expected to take over the presidency of the Board in 2019-2020 replacing, thus, Martin P. Egli. “The Board of Directors is well aware of the fact that this generation change implies a new management style also at the operational level and is con-vinced that several partners occupying new positions shall tackle the challenges with flying colours”, stressed the acting President, Martin P. Egli.