The Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking’s Sole Black C.E.O.
The Short Tenure and Abrupt Ouster of Banking’s Sole Black C.E.O.
Tidjane Thiam made Credit Suisse profitable again. But the Swiss rejected him as an outsider, and a sudden scandal took him down.
By
Kate Kelly
Last November, Urs Rohner, the chairman of the board of Credit Suisse, had a party at a Zurich restaurant to celebrate his 60th birthday. Among the scores of friends, family and business associates who gathered, attendees say, there was a single Black guest: Tidjane Thiam, the bank’s chief executive.
The festivities had a Studio 54 theme, with 1970s costumes and hired entertainers.
Mr. Thiam watched as a Black performer came onstage dressed as a janitor, and began to dance to music while sweeping the floor. Mr. Thiam excused himself and left the room. His partner and another couple at his table, including the chief executive of the British drug company GSK, followed. 
Eventually they returned to the party, only to be astonished again. A group of Mr. Rohner’s friends took the stage to perform their own musical number, all wearing Afro wigs. (Mr. Rohner declined to comment on the events, which were described by three guests.) 
For Mr. Thiam, now 58, the party was just one in a series of painful incidents that shaped his five years atop Credit Suisse, when he was the only Black chief executive in the top tier of banking. Some moments were shocking, others disturbing; most had to do with tensions around being Black in a predominantly white industry and an overwhelmingly white city.
A tall, reserved, bespectacled polyglot, Mr. Thiam did the job he was hired to do:
He made Credit Suisse profitable again after a long decline. But he never had to stop fighting for acceptance and respect, both within the bank and in Switzerland generally. At a shareholders meeting,
his background was denigrated as “third world.” A subordinate purchased the home next to his, which was taller and looked directly into Mr. Thiam’s windows. The Zurich press rode him for not appearing sufficiently Swiss.
Tidjane Thiam sits for an interview in Zurich last year. He had an uncomfortable relationship with the Swiss press; one publication wrote that he was “feted abroad, unloved in Switzerland.”Credit...Bloomberg
Now the number of Black chief executives at the highest level of banking is back to zero. In February, Credit Suisse’s board forced Mr. Thiam’s resignation, after a deeply embarrassing surveillance scandal erupted on his watch. When Mr. Thiam’s No. 2 admitted he had ordered investigators to spy on employees, the chief executive found himself with few allies and no leverage to survive.
His ouster attracted remarkably little notice outside Zurich, coming as it did months before a global reckoning with systemic bias, and occurring 4,000 miles from Wall Street. But interviews with 11 people who worked closely with Mr. Thiam at Credit Suisse, and five other close contacts — including clients, friends, family and investors — suggest tha
t race was an ever-present factor throughout his tenure, and that it helped create the conditions for his startlingly swift departure.
Whether it’s labeled racism, xenophobia or some other form of intolerance, what’s clear is that Mr. Thiam never stopped being seen in Switzerland as someone who didn’t belong.
Credit Suisse declined to comment.
After Mr. Thiam’s resignation, he gave a news conference at the bank’s headquarters. “Every second, I’ve done the best I could,” he said. “I am who I am. I cannot change who I am.” He added: “It’s the essence of injustice to hold against somebody what they are.”
‘The most important thing in life is not to die’
Tidjane Thiam (pronounced tee-JOHN tee-YAHM) was born in Ivory Coast to an elite family active in politics.
One relative led the country’s successful bid for independence from France in 1960 and became its first president. Another became the prime minister of Senegal.
The youngest of seven, Mr. Thiam was raised Muslim. His mother, Marietou, could not write but parented with perfectionist standards. “Be gallant, respect the staff that worked for us — on this, she was ruthless — do not lie, be punctual, do not say bad words, show solidarity,” said Yamousso Thiam, Mr. Thiam’s youngest sister, in an interview.
Their father, Amadou, was a journalist, a cabinet minister and an ambassador to Morocco. When Mr. Thiam was an infant, Amadou was incarcerated for three years on charges of plotting against the Ivorian government. The allegations were later invalidated, and the Thiam children would long remember the injustice — as they did the lesson their father took from narrowly surviving a coup attempt in 1971, with a gunshot wound to the hand. “The most important thing in life,” Amadou would joke, “is not to die.”
When Mr. Thiam was 6, and conspicuously uninterested in school, one of his brothers asked the Ivorian president to intervene. He summoned Mr. Thiam and his parents and reamed them out. “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” Mr. Thiam recalled in a 2015
interview. “There was a kind of family court, where there was an indictment: ‘He must go to school. The era of illiterate African princes and lazy kings, it is over.’”
Mr. Thiam quickly excelled, and in 1984 he became the first Ivorian to graduate from Paris’s prestigious École Polytechnique. After earning a degree in engineering and a master’s in business, Mr. Thiam worked at the World Bank, then in the Paris office of McKinsey.
In 1994, Mr. Thiam returned to Ivory Coast to work in public service. A few years later, he was promoted to minister of planning and development — but when a military coup deposed the president, he refused a role in the new government, and, fearing for his life, he returned to Europe and the private sector.
He ran the European operations of Aviva, a British insurer, and in 2009 was named chief executive of the British financial services firm Prudential —
the first Black person to run one of the London Stock Exchange’s hundred largest companies. During his tenure, Prudential’s profits doubled and its stock price tripled, and a BBC host described Mr. Thiam as having “soared through top-flight institutions with a heady cocktail of crystal-clear intellect, fizzing ambition, and a healthy dash of charm.”
Mr. Rohner, the chairman of Credit Suisse, approached Mr. Thiam about the possibility of running the bank in 2014. Mr. Thiam was skeptical, he later told
Euromoney magazine: It was a daunting role, and he wasn’t sure the bank was serious about hiring him. (Earlier in his career, he’d told a headhunter that he
wouldn’t travel for a job interview unless the prospective employer knew he was “Black, African, Francophone and 6 foot 4.”) He insisted on lengthy discussions with Mr. Rohner before agreeing to take the job.
“The chairman tells me we had 19 meetings,” Mr. Thiam said in the Euromoney interview, adding: “I actually said no twice.”
‘Sink down to the third world’
At the time, Credit Suisse was in a deep funk. Years after the financial crisis, it was still heavily dependent on costly trading strategies, and its wealth management unit trailed UBS, the bank’s archrival in Zurich. Investors were impatient with its languishing stock price. On the March 2015 day when Mr. Thiam’s hiring was announced, Credit Suisse shares rose 7 percent.
His restructuring plan involved thousand of layoffs and paring back sales and trading, making many employees nervous for their jobs. It was an executive he promoted, however, who gave Mr. Thiam one of his first unsettling experiences in Switzerland.
To bolster Credit Suisse’s private wealth management business, he had tapped Iqbal Khan, 39, who had been born in Pakistan but moved to Switzerland as a child. The two were discussing strategy one day late in 2015, according to people familiar with the incident, when Mr. Khan announced that he’d bought the house next door to Mr. Thiam’s in Herrliberg, a suburb with lofty prices and views of Lake Zurich. Mr. Thiam asked Mr. Khan if he was serious. Mr. Khan said yes.
Later, Mr. Thiam told friends and colleagues that the news disturbed him. Fiercely private, he was going through a divorce, and he was leery of a subordinate having a view of his low-slung property. As a C.E.O., he didn’t relish the idea of being literally looked down upon.
Mr. Thiam marched in a parade to mark the start of spring in Zurich, in April 2016.Credit...Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters
Mr. Thiam made an effort to embrace Zurich society. He visited Swiss business leaders, spoke on panels convened by Swiss media and attended an annual spring festival in traditional Swiss garb: a Napoleon-style hat and matching navy cloak. But before long, aspects of his lifestyle began to irritate the locals. With Credit Suisse making a show of cutting costs, the Swiss press began to catalog Mr. Thiam’s first-class air travel and stays in presidential suites. One column accused him of taking helicopters to events and traveling with an entourage, calling him “King Thiam.”
In a country nearly synonymous with wealth — the home of the Swiss bank account and six-figure wristwatches — such anti-elitism is a little difficult to parse. Expatriates who have long worked in Switzerland say
the Swiss have a fine-grained aversion to public displays of wealth, and regard those who flaunt it as outsiders. One foreign billionaire in the country, who did not want to be named discussing the issue, said he had banned luxury cars from his company garage.
Others were more direct about labeling Mr. Thiam an outsider. At Credit Suisse’s annual investor meeting in 2016,
a shareholder named Ingeborg Ginsberg, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, questioned Mr. Thiam’s background.
“The bank is called Suisse — Credit Suisse,” Ms. Ginsberg said in German. Referencing Brady Dougan, Mr. Thiam’s American predecessor, she added: “I asked him last year if he doesn’t have a conflict of interest. I ask the same question of Mr. Thiam, if he can understand me: Does he not have a conflict of interest? I heard him mention the third world — is that really what we want? That a good, solid, Swiss bank sinks to the level of the third world?”
On the dais, where Mr. Thiam sat next to Mr. Rohner, their shock was evident.
Mr. Rohner interrupted. “You should not make such accusations, without declaration, into the room,” he said, adding: “We do not always take foreigners, we always choose the best man for the job, and we have found that man.”
