6. Rene Bruelhart
Last year’s league table winner, the chief Vatican enforcer dug in at Hypi Lenzburg, the regional lender where he is a board member. At the Vatican, he has struck a delicate balance between modernizing the scandal-prone bank and respecting its idiosyncrasy.
Last year, he inked cooperation pacts with supervisors in Brazil, Poland and a key deal with Italy, and restored formal relations with the U.S., Germany, and Luxembourg. He has spent most of his career as a lawyer and financial enforcer, but looks poised for a change after five years in Rome.
5. Pierre Maudet
The Genevan isn’t a banker – he has sat in the city’s government for the past 10 years. However, the 39-year-old Maudet gets a pass because he has advocated fiercely to attract fintech to Geneva. Clearly, he understands that Geneva needs to provide for life after banking secrecy: his 2030 economic strategy for gave fintech a prominent place in the canton’s future.
Geneva incubator Fintech Fusion offers a 12-month program to budding startups. Currently in the running for a seat in Switzerland’s seven-member governing council, Maudet is one to watch. (Image: Keystone)
4. Christoph de Dardel
Another representative of French-speaking Switzerland, de Dardel rose to prominence this spring when Unigestion bought Akina, a private market asset manager. De Dardel is a 16-year veteran of the Geneva boutique who trained as an agricultural engineer.
His first ten professional years were spent at inspection firm SGS. A detour to telecoms firm Swisscom brought him to Unigestion in 2001 – incidentally, one of the only finance firms in Switzerland run by a woman, Fiona Frick.
