The strategy to regionalise the IWM arm of the bank has been called "Project Momentum".

Credit Suisse is dividing its international wealth-management unit into seven regions from four as its chief executive Tidjane Thiam regionalises the Zurich-listed bank’s operations, Bloomberg reported, quoting unnamed sources.

The unit led by Iqbal Khan will give the regions more freedom to make decisions and each will have its own management, the report said. The seven regions are Latin America, Brazil, Western Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe.

The strategy has been dubbed “Project Momentum” and could be unveiled as soon as this week, the newswire said. The report did not refer to other parts of the bank's business operations, such as in Asia-Pacific.

Credit Suisse declined to comment when contacted by WealthBriefing today on the matter.

Thiam has already made a number of changes to the lender, such as creating the international wealth management unit in 2015, as well as building out the Asia-Pacific business and legally separate entity, the Swiss Universal Bank. The structure, this publication understands, is designed to give managers more autonomy coupled with more accountability and build a more transparent set-up.

As the report noted, the strategy differs to that of UBS, which moved earlier this year to put all its wealth operations, including those of the Americas where the model had been more transactional, under one organisational roof.

Along with some of its banking peers, Credit Suisse has also focused more of its efforts on faster growing regions such as Asia. And Thiam’s strategy appears to be paying off. In July it reported a surge in year-on-year pre-tax income (PTI) for the second quarter of 2018, with PTI rising 81 per cent to SFr1.052 billion ($1.064 billion). Net income attributable to shareholders rose 114 per cent to SFr647 million. For the first six months of this year, pre-tax income was SFr2.106 billion, a 68 per cent rise from the same half of 2017.

Within the international wealth management division, pre-tax income rose 19 per cent year-on-year to SFr433 million, of which private banking, at SFr347 million, saw a 17 per cent rise. This division’s cost/income ratio was 67.4 per cent, tightening from 70.5 per cent a year before. Assets under management rose to SFr370.7 billion, up by SFr10.2 billion on a year earlier. Net new assets were SFr5.2 billion, faster than the SFR4.6 billion in NNA a year before although down from SFr5.5 billion in the previous three months.