BASEL: Hinduja Bank (Switzerland), a Sfr2.3 billion private bank controlled by the Indian billionaire family, has declared it will stay in the country and invest in growing its business there, in an effort to quell speculation over its future following comments over the summer from Gopichand Hinduja.
In a statement on September 1, the bank’s vice-chairman Michel Broch said that while the drive towards greater transparency in banking might cause concern “for some”, this was “emphatically not the case” for Hinduja Bank.
Questions were raised over the bank’s future in the Alpine nation after Gopichand Hinduja, who is the global co-chairman of the Hinduja conglomerate, said in July that growing tax transparency would lead to the world’s wealthy turning their backs on Switzerland and the country losing importance as a private banking hub. In an interview with Bloomberg, Hinduja said: “People are finding new havens.”
But in the latest statement, Shanu SP Hinduja, who is the Swiss bank’s other vice-chairman and the daughter of Gopichand’s older brother Srichand, added that her father “recognises the future potential of Hinduja Bank in the Swiss market and so do I”.
Srichand Hinduja is the global chairman of the family conglomerate as well as chairman of Hinduja Bank, which was founded in Geneva in 1994. Shanu Hinduja added that the bank had “recently completed an upgrade of its technology platform”, switching to Swiss software provider Avaloq in order to be able to offer clients a more tailored service. She said the bank had “further plans to invest”.
These may or may not include expansion through acquisition, a spokesman said, though the primary focus is to be on organic growth. Some years ago, in 2010, Hinduja Bank agreed to acquire certain private banking operations of Belgium’s KBC Group, but the deal fell through the following year after Luxembourg regulators failed to approve it.
