Tidjane Thiam

Tidjane Thiam was born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and had a distinguished career before banking — he served as minister of planning in Ivory Coast and as CEO of Prudential plc in the UK. He joined Credit Suisse as CEO in 2015 with a mandate to transform the bank. He pursued a strategy of pivoting away from volatile investment banking toward more stable wealth management, building up the asset management and private banking businesses particularly in Asia. His tenure was marked by deep cost cuts and difficult decisions about the investment bank's scope. He was pushed out in February 2020 following a corporate espionage scandal — it emerged that Credit Suisse had hired private investigators to surveil departing senior executives. Credit Suisse's subsequent collapse in 2023, years later, validated many of the structural challenges Thiam had grappled with.