One of the most prominent names in Swiss private banking is to be the new CEO of Falcon Private Bank.

Falcon Private Bank, the Swiss-based firm owned by Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company, has recruited industry luminary Walter Berchtold as its new chief executive, stepping in to replace retiring CEO Eduardo Leemann.

The private bank said that Berchtold, who has been on its board since May last year, takes over as CEO from 1 October; Leemann remains at the bank as a senior advisor, it said in a statement today. 

Berchtold, 54, has more than 30 years of experience in the banking industry. He was named head of private banking of Credit Suisse in 2004. In 2011 he gave up the operational responsibility and continued to serve as chairman of the private banking division. From 2003 until 2012, Berchtold was member of the bank’s executive board. Since then he has been acting as an independent financial industry expert.

Among other recent appointments, in May this year the bank elected H E Khaled Balama AlTameemi as a board member. AlTameemi has held various executive roles; since 2008 he has been executive director of the real estate department at Abu Dhabi Investment Council and on the board of a number of entities, including the Central Bank of the UAE since 2008.

The bank, which has a presence in Switzerland, London, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Dubai, has recently been touched by controversy. In July, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state’s regulator, said it had found control failings and other shortcomings at Falcon, as well as UBS, Standard Chartered and DBS as the watchdog probes transactions linked to scandal-hit Malaysian state-fund fund, 1MDB. (For more detail, see here.) Falcon said it is co-operating with investigations.