LONDON: Credit Suisse is planning to tap investors for as much as SFR5 billion ($5.2 billion) through the sale of new shares, according to a report in the Financial Times.
Tidjane Thiam, the bank’s new CEO, will launch the capital raising on October 21 when he unveils a new strategy.
The FT doesn’t say exactly how much fresh capital the Swiss bank is seeking to raise.
It cites a poll by Goldman Sachs analysts published last week that found 91% of investors expected the bank to raise SFR5 billion.
A spokesman at Credit Suisse declined to comment.
Regulators are taking a tougher line on bank capital, and Credit Suisse is notably lacking compared to peers.
Its common equity capital ratio, considered to be a measure of how resilient a bank is to financial shocks, is at 10.3% compared with Swiss rival UBS’s 13.5%.
Banks are starting to deal with higher capital ratios and more demanding methods of calculating capital as rules put in place after the 2008 financial crisis begin to ite.
On Wednesday evening, Deutsche Bank warned investors of a €6.2 billion ($7 billion) expected loss for the third-quarter on tougher asset valuation rules.
Thiam is expected to refocus the bank away from risky investment banking, which will be hardest hit by capital rules, and looks towards Asia as a regional driver of revenue.
