Julius Baer Reshuffles Boardroom

Tom Burroughes

15 January 2019

Julius Baer’s board is proposing to elect prominent Swiss businessman and private bank luminary Romeo Lacher as ithe new non-executive chairman at its 10 April annual meeting. The Swiss private bank has also nominated two other senior financial services figures to serve on its board.

Lacher, if elected, will replace Daniel Sauter, who decided not to seek re-election after his tenure of 12 years as board member. He has been chairman for the past seven years. However, Sauter will retain a relationship with Julius Baer by continuing to act as president of the Julius Baer Foundation Board.

The bank’s board has also nominated Eunice Zehnder-Lai and Olga Zoutendijk for election as new board members. Andreas Amschwand and Gareth Penny are not seeking re-election at the AGM. However, other members want to be re-elected.

Lacher has been chairman of the board of directors of SIX Group since 2016 and served as its vice chairman from 2008 until 2016. He is expected to keep this mandate also as chairman of Julius Baer. Furthermore, he is a member of the board of directors of exchange-listed Wordline, France, the electronic payments and transaction services firm. Lacher spent 26 years at Credit Suisse, where he was responsible for private banking region EMEA/Western Europe, and was chief operating officer at Credit Suisse International Wealth Management until 2016.

Eunice Zehnder-Lai is a dual Swiss and Hong Kong citizen. She is a member of the board of directors of Geberit Group and DKSH Group. Until November 2018, she was CEO of Institut für Persönlichkeitsorientiertes Management, an advisory firm in Switzerland specialising in customer centricity. Eunice Zehnder-Lai has 20 years of experience in the financial industry, having worked for LGT Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, covering asset and portfolio management, private wealth and corporate finance.

Olga Zoutendijk is a dual Australian and Dutch citizen, with 30 years of experience of banking in Asia, Australia, Europe and the US. During her career, she held senior executive positions in retail, corporate and investment banking with ABN AMRO Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and Westpac Banking Corporation. From 2014 to 2018, Zoutendijk was a member of the supervisory board of ABN AMRO Group, which she chaired from 2016 to 2018. She is a member of the board of governors of Leiden University in the Netherlands.