Heinz Fischer, group global head of network management for Credit Suisse, died Wednesday night following a brief illness, Global Custodian has learned from a colleague at Credit Suisse.
Fischer, who grew up in Switzerland, joined Credit Suisse in 1986. In his first year, he participated in its international securities training program, which consisted of studying and on-the-job training in the departments of various securities operations within the bank. Beginning in 1989, he spent 18 months working in the Credit Suisse Tokyo office handling the growing volume of outbound business conducted by the trust and securities department there.
That brought him back to Zurich, where he worked in the Credit Suisse operations department for two years. After attending an intensive training course in New York, he returned to Zurich where, by 2001, he had worked his way up to head of the Securities Custody Operations Department, which handled all non-trading settlements on behalf of clients of the retail and private bank in more than 60 markets around the globe, as well as the Swiss domestic market.
As head of network management at Credit Suisse, Fischer oversaw the combination of the separate networks run by its Private Banking and Investment Banking divisions and developed a single bank-wide network management function, run by separate teams based in London, New York, Singapore and Zurich, covering cash as well as securities.
He witnessed first-hand and helped to usher in a new era of network managers. The modern network manager has to know not just about internal processes, but also external processes, and to have a good understanding of products, he told Global Custodian last year. We are a hub that facilitates the entry of the bank into the markets of the world, but we also have to support the relationship managers, the traders, the risk managers, the tax managers and the legal and compliance department within the different divisions.
Fischer, a GC Legend, was inducted into the Global Custodian Securities Services Hall of Fame in 2009.
(CG)