Credit Suisse Has a Plan to Integrate Its Three Divisions, and CIO Tom Sanzone is Up to the Challenge
Credit Suisse
Paradeplatz 8
8070 Zurich
Switzerland
SIZE OF FIRM:
Market capitalization of $61.7 billion.
PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
Citigroup, CIO of corporate and investment banking; Salomon Brothers, managing director and head of global application development.
EDUCATION:
B.S. in computer science from Hofstra University.
WHO WAS YOUR MENTOR?
A number of CIOs that I've worked for - Fran Dramis, CIO of BellSouth; Tom Miglis, CIO of Citadel Investment Group; and Bob Druskin, CEO of the Global Corporate and Investment Banking Group at Citigroup.
WHAT WORK EXPERIENCE HAS HAD THE MOST LASTING IMPRESSION ON YOUR CAREER?
At Salomon Brothers in the early '90s, we went from a mainframe-centric environment to fully embracing distributed technology and workstations, and we built one of the first digital trading floors. We were working with companies that are big names now, but back then it was very small, very new technology. It was a very exciting time.
Top 3 Current Projects
Integration
Objective:
As we bring together the investment banking, private banking and asset management divisions, which are very substantial, there will be dozens of projects on which we will embark to integrate the organization and get efficiency and productivity benefits out of doing that.
Improvement
Objective:
We are pursuing a number of projects for improvement, such as building out our commodities business. Right now, we're a relatively small player in commodities, and we want to be a large player. There are projects to extend our platforms around the globe into new geographies, including Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. And there are a number of initiatives to help drive synergies between the three businesses - there's a lot of work around how we capture the value of running as one bank.
Innovation
Objective:
Technology-driven innovation really could revolutionize our productivity and expense base, or drive business opportunities that are enabled with innovation. We're looking at a number of efforts in that stream to have a major impact over the next three years on the company.
2007 Initiatives
Consolidating Private Banks
We are going to combine the independent private banks that are part of Credit Suisse into one company called Clariden Leu. That combines four or five independent private banks under one umbrella, which actually makes them a much stronger company. There's a tremendous amount of technology work to get all of the companies on one platform, and that's the goal.
Building Out Businesses
We're doing a tremendous amount of work building out our derivatives business. We're investing in building out a commodities business as well, and they are multiyear efforts. We have a strong prime brokerage and prime services business and we're investing in expanding that.
Grow Asset Management Platform
There'll be a number of efforts to grow the asset management platform and get into new geographies and new investment opportunities. There's a lot of focus around growing the asset management business and expanding the product set and geographies.
Vitals
IT Budget:
Approximately $2.4 billion.
Key Technology Management:
- Phil Cushmaro, CIO, Investment Bank
- Karl Landert, CIO, Private Bank
- Duncan Avery, CIO, Asset Management
Size of Technology Team:
More than 7,000 employees and 2,000 contractors.
Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:
Very few. Less than 10 percent.
Key Technology Partners:
We partner with all the big players - all of the key technology providers to the industry.
Success Metrics:
Currently, we're working on a set of performance metrics across the organizations, and a number of those metrics will be in the project space. We're in the process of implementing the standard metrics.
Virtualization in many dimensions - in disk and servers and many different areas - is going to revolutionize the way we support this business. We're spending a lot of time in R&D and product delivery in virtualizing our infrastructure. If you were to implement it at its highest potential, you would basically be able to have an on-demand infrastructure - access to disk and CPU and all the various resources in the infrastructure on an on-demand basis and the ability to upgrade or downgrade your consumption of those resources on the fly.
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