Many private banking clients are still cautious but are starting to redeploy their cash piles into risk-assets, says Credit Suisse senior executives, according to the Business Times.

Worldwide, “in general, the private banking client is still very cautious”, Walter Berchtold, chief executive of private banking at Credit Suisse, told the publication in Singapore. “There is still a pretty large amount of his wealth in cash,” he said.

A survey published by Banc of America/Merrill Lynch this week showed that fund managers around the world have switched assets from cash and into riskier assets, encouraged by expectations of economic recovery. However, investors continue to have lingering concerns about how sustainable any recovery will be.

At the height of the crisis, more than half the wealth of the bank's rich clients was in cash, Mr Berchtold was quoted as saying.

Since then, "the very high cash position has been reduced by about 8 per cent and gone back into the market", Marcel Kreis, the bank's Asia-Pacific head of private banking, also was quoted as saying.

Demand for some types of structured products has returned in the past two or three months, mainly related to the fixed-income, credit and commodity markets, said Mr Berchtold.

In Asia, in particular, “we see a gradual interest again in selectively using credit to enhance their investments”, Mr Kreis said.

“Even accumulators are making a comeback - nowhere in the magnitudes as before - but it's a viable instrument if your general outlook on equities is a positive one, and that's certainly been the case,” he added.

Stock accumulators are products in which investors agree to buy a stock at a fixed price at regular intervals, thus accumulating a large position in the stock over time. When asset prices slumped in the crisis, many investors found themselves adding to their losses because they were obliged to keep paying the fixed price for the stocks even as prices fell.