Schwyzer Kantonalbank, one of the plethora of Swiss cantonal, or state, banks, has appointed a new female CEO. She joins the bank from banking giant UBS. The switch away from the big firm is not a first. Schwyzer Kantonalbank (SZKB) is early out of the starting block and has found a replacement for outgoing CEO Peter Hilfiker. Hilfiker is handing over responsibility for the bank at the end of March 2021 and will retire.
Susanne Thellung has been selected as his successor. She joins from UBS, where she currently heads the business management corporate and institutional clients. From 2004 through 2018 Thellung was working for UBS Switzerland, including as regional head of all customer segments for the entire central Swiss region.
She will be the first female head of a cantonal bank. These banks, typically owned by the regional tier of the Swiss state, have some catching up to do in respect to the representation of female top managers.
In 2018, the share of female managers at 19 such banks was 45 percent. In the middle management though the share was 17 percent and among top managers, the number dropped to a paltry 9 percent, ie less than one in ten. The executive boards had 8 percent women, while 18 percent of supervisory board members was female, with 16 percent of the chairs taken by women. The background of Thellung comes as less of a surprise. UBS has a good reputation as a training ground for female managers. But, equally so, a perceived difficulty to tie the women to the bank. For a variety of reasons, they tend to leave earlier or later.
One such example is Laura Meyer. She is managing director and head of digital distribution and analytics at UBS Switzerland. At the end of the year, Meyer will join Hotelplan, the travel agency of Swiss retail giant Migros. The company employs 2,100 staff and has sales of 1.54 billion Swiss francs.
Another well-known case was Dagmar Kamber Borens. She first signed at the Swiss unit of Credit Suisse as chief operating officer (COO), before later joining Quintet, the private-banking group assembled by ex-UBS executive Juerg Zeltner.
Kamber Borens had spent 17 years with UBS, having started in its private bank after her Ph.D. At the turn of the century, Kamber Borens joined the M&A-desk in London. For another four years, from 2004 through 2008, she worked in the personal staff of the chairman, before being appointed as chief of staff of the group finance.
And sometimes they even retrace their steps and return to the fold. Simone Westerfeld (pictured below), who had been with the bank from 2000 to 2006 had then joined the University of St. Gallen. In 2015 she be CFO at Basler Kantonalbank and later had a spell as interim CEO of the bank (2018-2019).
She has since rejoined UBS and received the position as deputy head of corporate and institutional clients international. There, she catered to the complex world of global corporate clients. In 2020, Westerfeld became head of personal banking, taking charge of the business with private clients for the bank in its home market of Switzerland.
