MASECO Private Wealth, a firm specialising in catering to expat US citizens wrestling with increasingly fierce regulations abroad, has appointed Gordon Hunt as chief operating officer.

Hunt will be joining a team in Switzerland. He was previously a senior vice president and member of the management committee of Rothschild Bank in Zurich. For a ten-year period, Hunt held the positions of chief financial officer, chief operating officer and most recently chief risk officer manager of the private banking and trust division. He had previously spent seventeen years at Merrill Lynch, principally in Swiss and international private banking.

“Since we started MASECO Private Wealth we have experienced rapid growth, mainly due to legislative and regulatory changes in the US,” said Yann Rousset, executive director of MASECO Private Wealth.

Since the US government signed off on laws such as FATCA last year, the compliance burden on foreign financial firms dealing with US expat clients has increased considerably, prompting some banks and other institutions to cut back on their services to such customers on grounds of cost.