Tom Sanzone Moves IT Ahead at Credit Suisse

Capabilities and presence extending in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, Streamlined processes, structures and systems deliver better results to clients, Virtualization technologies employed to improve efficiency, quality and online capability

Credit Suisse

Tom Sanzone

Chief Information Officer

PREVIOUS POSITIONS:
CIO of corporate and investment banking, Citigroup; managing director and head of global application development, Salomon Brothers.

EDUCATION:
B.S. in computer science, Hofstra University.

Credit Suisse
Paradeplatz 8 8070 Zurich Switzerland

SIZE OF FIRM:
Market capitalization of 115.2 billion CHF (approximately US$93 billion).

LAST GOOD BOOK YOU READ:
I actually re-read one of my all-time favorite books, "The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People," by Stephen Covey. It's a great book not only from a business perspective, but everything in there applies to life in general.

What's Next?

From a technology perspective, virtualization will have a profound impact on the way we deliver certain capabilities to our clients and developers. When you look at the virtualization of the servers, the network, and you think about the way this business has been run for the last 10 to 15 years and the model we used in delivering distributed technology, you could see a dramatic change in that. We've already seen a dramatic change in our business, both in capability and in pricing.

VITALS

IT Budget:

$2.3 billion (down $100 million from 2006).

Key Technology Management:

N/A

Size of Technology Team:

More than 10,000 employees and contractors globally.

Percent of IT Projects Outsourced:

Slightly more than in 2006, which was less than 10 percent.

Key Technology Partners:

All of the major players in the industry, as well as early-stage companies.

Success Metrics:

We put in a whole framework around how we manage the performance of IT. At the top of the performance structure we put in place, our overall objective is creating competitive advantage. Competitive advantage is delivered through four dimensions -- pricing, quality, capability and risk management. These are the four pillars; we want everyone to understand that IT is not one-dimensional.

2008 INITIATIVES

Most of the things we're doing strategically are multiyear, so we're going to continue to build out our business in high-growth markets. We're going to build out our existing platforms that we want to grow, such as those in our commodities or prime broker businesses, as an example. Our focus on client centricity and virtualization are also going to continue well into 2008.

TOP 3 CURRENT PROJECTS

Extending Platform Into New Markets

A tremendous amount of investment has been made in all three businesses in extending our capability and our presence in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. In some of the businesses, such as our private banking business, we're even extending into mature markets, such as the U.S.

Focusing on Client Centricity

We're doing a lot of work now on a set of processes, structures and systems to focus on better organizing the "One Bank," all of our resources around the bank, to deliver better results to our clients. We are working across the three divisions and are coming up with some interesting, innovative ways to interface with our clients.

Concentrating on Virtualization

We're really looking to embrace virtualization. We have a number of initiatives in the data center space to do significant virtualization of the distributed infrastructure, as well as virtualizing the desktop environments in order to allow our people to work effectively anywhere and have full access to the firm's resources. We believe virtualization will not only improve our efficiency, but also improve quality, increase capability significantly and help us manage risk by having a smaller footprint.