Jan 16 (Reuters) – Switzerland’s two big banks — UBS and Credit Suisse — should not be forced to split their wealth management and commercial banking operations into separate entities, the new head of the country’s central bank said on Saturday.
Philipp Hildebrand, who took over as chairman of the Swiss National Bank at the start of the month, said the universal banking model provided useful synergies for Swiss banks.
Hildebrand has said repeatedly that major Swiss banks need tighter regulation to deal with the “too big to fail” problem.
But he said in an interview in the Swiss daily Le Temps that something as radical as the Glass Steagall Act, which previously separated investment and commercial bank functions in the United States, would not make sense in Switzerland.
“The universal banking model represents a form of risk diversification,” Hildebrand was quoted as saying.
