Family Office
Credit Suisse lifts Mexican wealth team from UBS
Bank steps up efforts to win private-client wallet share in Latin
America. Credit Suisse has poached a Zurich-based team of
Mexican-market wealth specialists from UBS in a bid to strengthen
its position in the growing Latin American Wealth market.
The former UBS team, 12 advisors and four assistants, work with
wealthy individuals and families in Latin America's second most
populous country.
Rush
The move follows Credit Suisse's late-2006 acquisition of a
majority stake in Brazilian wealth-management firm
Hedging-Griffo. Brazil is Latin America's most populous country,
and -- along with India, Russia and China -- it's touted as one
of the world's emerging major economies. Last year Goldman Sachs
predicted that combined "BRIC" economies would surpass the
collective material output of the G7 industrialized economies by
2040.
Latin America saw a 9.7% year-over-year increase in its
U.S.-dollar millionaire population in 2005, according to
Capgemini 's 2006 World Wealth Report. The number of U.S.
millionaires increased 6.6% in 2005.
Credit Suisse isn't alone in its desire to get in on Latin
American wealth market.
In separate liftouts earlier this year Morgan Stanley pulled in a
total of 16 private-client specialists from Goldman and Lehman
Brothers.
UBS acquired Brazilian wealth manager and investment bank Banco
Pactual (now UBS Pactual) about five months prior to Credit
Suisse's buy in at Hedging-Griffo. In 2005 Zurich-based UBS
bought Frankfurt-based Dresdner Bank 's Latin American private
banking business. -FWR
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