Fine wine, fast profits: The man who led BSI Bank into the abyss

SINGAPORE (Jan 6): He was the leader of one of the largest mass defections in private banking history, with more than 100 staff following him from RBS Coutts Bank in the thick of the global credit crisis to create a financial phenomenon in Singapore at a little-known Swiss bank.

Hanspeter Brunner, together with former deputy Raj Sriram and chief operating officer Gary Tucker, were the kernel of a plan by BSI SA, founded in 1873 in Lugano, to build up a US$10 billion ($14.3 billion) wealth-management business serving the burgeoning ranks of Asia’s millionaires.

Brunner, a veteran Swiss private banker who has spent more than two decades in Asia, offered his Coutts colleagues an extraordinary lifeboat. Then-parent Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc was being bailed out by the UK government, while all around the financial industry was culling tens of thousands of jobs.

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