In today’s webcast Mr Jean-Pierre Cuoni, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of EFG International engagingly presents the originality behind his bank, which has known a stellar success since its launch in 1995. Over the last 12 years EFG has grown from a start-up bank to a global player with SFr 87 billion assets under management (AuM) and 469 client advisors.

Enjoy the full webcast, a “must see” for anybody engaged in the private banking industry:

In the opening lines of the interview Mr Cuoni goes straight to the heart of EFG’s very particular business model:

We built this bank for client relationship officers and around them. CROs as we call them. Our model is based on the philosophy that we are hiring professional and experienced CROs, expected to bring in their clients, and we set them free. Free of bureaucracy, free of sales targets, free of conflict of interest, and free to serve their clients the way they believe it is right. We accept that clients belong to the CROs in the first place and not to the bank. We are providing infrastructure and help to these CROs, so as to be in a maximum way successful. That, at the end of the day, creates happy CROs, happy staff members and with it happy clients. And that, I believe, is the key to the success.

When we asked if EFG’s business model and growth was sustainable, Mr Cuoni outlined the reasons why he believed his bank would continue to grow over the years, despite a slowdown in the last quarter. He also pointed out that “heavy producers” would want to increasingly participate more in their production and success, a factor that their model accounts for.

How far EFG goes in “liberating” their CROs is illustrated in Mr Cuoni’s response to the question about client segmentation and investment policy. He stresses that it is left to each CRO to make the decisions they believe are the right ones. Obviously, compliance is a tricky issue in such a decentralized system. Mr Cuoni explains what they have put in place at EFG to build an excellent reputation for compliance.

At the end of the webcast we asked Mr Cuoni what the “essence of private banking” meant to him:

Relationships and providing the conditions for these relationships to flourish. That is the key issue in private banking […] Don’t forget, clients do not bank with a bank, clients bank with a person in a bank. I submit that it is more difficult for a client to find his banker in one of the banks, more difficult than for a banker to find a client.

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