Credit Suisse History & Founding Timeline

Credit Suisse's prime brokerage division allowed Archegos Capital Management to accumulate concentrated leveraged positions in media stocks equivalent to approximately 20 billion USD in notional exposure through total return swaps, without adequate counterparty exposure limits, real-time position monitoring, or margin call protocols that would have triggered risk reduction before losses became catastrophic. The approximately 5.5 billion USD loss was entirely preventable through standard prime brokerage risk management practices that other banks applied more rigorously, and its magnitude reflected years of insufficient investment in counterparty risk infrastructure.

Credit Suisse Asset Management created and marketed approximately 10 billion USD in supply chain finance funds using Greensill Capital as the underlying investment manager, marketing these products to private banking clients as low-risk, short-duration instruments comparable to money market funds. The due diligence process for assessing Greensill Capital's credit quality, the concentration of fund assets in single borrower exposures, and the liquidity characteristics of the instruments was demonstrably inadequate, resulting in fund freezes and significant client losses that directly damaged the private banking franchise that was Credit Suisse's most valuable asset.

In 2019, Credit Suisse was revealed to have commissioned private surveillance of former star banker Iqbal Khan and later its own Chief Operating Officer, commissioning private detectives to follow senior employees during career transition disputes. The scandal resulted in the death of a contracted surveillance operative, Tidjane Thiam's resignation as CEO, and significant reputational damage that reinforced external perceptions of internal governance dysfunction and management culture problems that the subsequent restructuring plans did not adequately address.