About

ODDO BHF (Switzerland) was founded in 1974 and is headquarted in Zurich and has a branch in Geneva. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ODDO BHF in Frankfurt and is thus part of the Franco-German private bank group ODDO BHF. The bank’s main business areas are asset consulting and asset management as well as financial planning for international high net-worth private clientele. The legal, compliance and tax team reports to the head of legal, compliance and tax Dr Julia Szemerédy who directly reports to the management team. The legal team consists of three part-time Swiss lawyers and one Canadian lawyer. The most important change of the legal team has been the merger between the legal and the compliance and tax team in 2018, when Dr Szemerédy took over the responsibility for both teams after having been head of legal since 2013. This allows the three teams to use important synergies in understanding the bank’s needs. The team prides itself on its culture of ‘open communication within the team, being sparring partners to each other and heading to constructive solutions for the business while complying with the new rules and regulations’, says Dr Szemerédy. Long lasting cooperation between the single members of the team help to build up the trust needed for open communication. All team members are generalists, who have gained the ability to very quickly capture the relation between new rules or requirements and the bank’s needs. Given the international group structure of the bank, the legal team also needed to understand the group view, and the situation of colleagues in the much bigger business structures in Germany and France.