With all the stories of pressures on Swiss banking, the Alpine state’s industry appears to be on the defensive. But as far as Reyl Group is concerned, this firm takes a very different approach.

With all the stories of pressures on Swiss banking, the Alpine state’s industry appears to be on the defensive. But Geneva-headquartered bank Reyl Group is taking a very different approach. A few days ago, it set up store in London’s smart St James’s district through its Reyl & Co incarnation.

And the focus is on added-value services, in going the extra mile – or kilometre – to give clients the best possible service across a wide range of fields, the firm’s executives told this publication recently.

While commentators urge Swiss banks to work harder and give up the old, low-maintenance, high-secrecy model of old, this 40-year-old bank says it has been taking this course for some time.

“We are trying to position ourselves as a dynamic, entrepreneurial Swiss bank that is reinventing the model away from traditional portfolio management...providing added-value to entrepreneurs on a global scale. There is a new breed of bank emerging in the industry serving both sides [in the UK and Switzerland],” François Reyl, a scion of the Reyl dynasty that founded the eponymous bank, said.

“For the last 10 years we have focused on diversifying our offering; in our view, there are very clear pressures on the Swiss banking industry today, which is facing an ever-increasing volume of regulatory initiatives resulting in operational stress and margin erosions. These are headwinds that the industry is facing.”

And those pressures are considerable. Although Switzerland is still the world’s biggest offshore centre, catering to $2.1 trillion of assets (source: The Economist), attacks on the country’s secrecy laws and a number of high-profile wrangles involving firms such as UBS and Wegelin, have meant the country needs to reinvent its model to stay in the game. For a country where around 12 per cent of gross domestic product comes from the financial sector, the stakes are high.

If Reyl – currently overseeing a total of around SFr7 billion ($7.5 billion) of assets – is able to present a much more open face to the world, it could in its own way help change the image of Swiss banking abroad. And as Mr Reyl told this publication, it is anyway foolish to suppose that Switzerland, with its highly-educated workforce, legal stability and experience, cannot see its banks thrive at home and abroad.

“We think one way to counter these pressures is to move our service and product offering higher in the value chain and to capitalise on Switzerland’s cores,” he said, arguing that the country, with its well-educated workforce, long experience in finance, high-quality services and connections, boded well for the future. “Switzerland remains an attractive, stable place from which to develop a creative and successful financial institution.”

London calling

As reported here a few days ago, heading the London office is managing partner Ladislas Safyurtlu, who has a background in portfolio management from previous roles at Pictet Asset Management and Morgan Stanley in London, New York, Zurich and Geneva, as well as Credit Suisse in Paris. He is involved in its international development and is a member of the group’s investment committee.

Reyl has expanded rapidly in recent years. The firm acquired its banking licence in Switzerland in 2010; besides its Geneva HQ, it has an office in Singapore, Paris, Luxembourg, Zurich, Lugano and Hong Kong – and now London. Its target client base is entrepreneurs, such as those with cross-border interests.

In 2006, Reyl set up a private office; its institutional asset management business was launched in 2003 and made a separate business entity in 2009. Funds are distributed in Europe and Asia.  The four pillars of the firm are wealth management, asset management, the private office, and corporate advisory. The latter – corporate advisory – is to be unveiled soon in an official sense although the firm has already provided this service for the past 18 months.

As reported here last November,  Reyl Group appointed a new chief executive for its Singapore office. Nicolas Duchêne takes the lead role at Reyl Singapore in addition to his current responsibilities as managing director of Reyl Private Office. There is, it seems, plenty going on at this firm in all its regions.

And Mr Reyl was certainly in ebullient mood in the smart London offices his firm now calls home.

“We have grown this business tremendously in the past 10 years. Since the year of 2008, assets have risen five-fold…assets under management rose by around 60 per cent last year,” Mr Reyl said. “We realised that we had to have a presence in London.”

For example, clients such as UK non-doms are the sort of clients whom Reyl can serve. “It would be lacking in our organisation for us not to have an operation in London,” he said.

At present, the firm oversees around £100 million (about $150 million) of client money run via London; the aim is to more than double that amount over the next two years and to reach about half a billion pounds in the next three to five years.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumours of the death of Swiss banking have been greatly exaggerated.