About

With roughly 140 employees, the legal and compliance department at Zürcher Kantonalbank (ZKB) provides independent legal advice to the bank and its employees with regards to all kinds of legal, regulatory and policy as well as compliance matters. General counsel Dr Tom Fischer describes the team as ‘very ambitious and open-minded to legal and business challenges, always eager to learn and grow’. This is evident in the team’s ability to handle ZKB’s universal background with clients residing mainly in Switzerland but to some extent also abroad, something which has required the team to adapt to a very broad range of legal areas and jurisdictions. These areas include general legal advice on banking products and services to all kinds of client segments, from retail, to wealth management, corporate and institutional clients. It is also involved in product structuring advice in the area of mortgage, structured finance, leasing, capital, debt market, general banking products and services such as advisory and discretionary services, asset management as well as supporting the bank in ongoing M&A transactions. Amongst it several most impressive transactions, the acquisition of Swisscanto Asset Management and integration into Zurich Cantonal Bank Group, particularly stand out, as it resulted in being Switzerland’s third largest asset manager. ZKB also boasts a strong compliance department that is key in taking care of AML, controls and supervision of different bank matters and its employees. Fischer joined ZKB two and a half years ago and since then initiated and pulled through a profound change of culture and performance with the legal and compliance team. ‘In the last two and a half years, Tom Fischer and his management team put great time and effort into not only restructuring the legal and compliance department but also to shape the culture of their department and bring it to the next level’, says a member of the team. Within this period, the department has made significant developments from a traditional banking legal department to become a more modern function which is acting as partner to the business. ‘The management team and all the employees in the firm are very proud of what they have accomplished and are looking forward to the journey ahead’ says Fischer. Other noteworthy senior legal counsel in the team include: Sibylle Frey, head of asset management, investment services and products legal, who established a new team of distinguished and highly motivated legal specialists in various banking and asset management products and services. Daniel Strazzer, head of compliance, successfully oversaw and facilitated the integration of a considerable number of employees from other departments within the bank into the compliance department. Samuel Stadelmann, head of trading, sales and capital markets legal, has increased efficiency following the integration of OTC derivatives and structured products documentation teams into his department and has considerably developed the trading compliance team. And finally, Urs Schroeder, head of custody, operations and digitisation legal who has successfully built a strong team with senior DP lawyers and legal specialists on digitisation, keeping up with current financial industry developments.