Private banking giant Credit Suisse may have surprised some of its competitors with a move to hire fresh graduates for its wealth management business - a division in which staff loyalty has become a thorny issue.
Although it will continue to compete with other banks to hire experienced private banking professionals - especially those who have existing good customer ties - the Swiss bank is now also going after inexperienced graduates who aspire to become wealth managers after being trained in-house for several years.
The bank last year launched a hiring programme called "Grow Our Own", aiming to train fresh university graduates to become assistant relationship managers after one year and MBA holders into relationship managers after three years. The Zurich-headquartered bank received more than 5,000 applications for the program, though it offered only 30 vacancies.
"If you consider that a relationship manager manages around 50 clients, you would need some 70,000 RMs (relation managers) in the market. In reality, we have less than 10 per cent of those numbers," said Francesco de Ferrari, head of private banking, Asia-Pacific, at Credit Suisse.
"So the question is, where could we find the human talent to be able to cater for clients that are becoming wealthier and wealthier?" Graduates from top business schools such as the London Business School and INSEAD flocked for the positions, he said.
The scarcity of qualified and experienced talent had prompted Credit Suisse to invest in training green hands into professionals, although it would normally take two to three years to see a return from investing in fresh people, which was much slower than finding an experienced hire directly from the market, he said.