The three-pronged reorganisation of the domestic division should lead to an improvement in earnings of around 400 million Swiss francs in the next three years, based on a combination of revenue growth and expenditure cuts, SBC said in a statement.
SBC said it aims for its domestic division to be the most profitable supplier in the market for private and business clients in Switzerland, as well as for corporate clients here and in the border region.
The bank will endeavour to offset most of the job losses through natural attrition, retirements and the use of flexible working hours. New jobs will also be created in the future, notably in private banking, SBC said.
The measures decided by the executive committee regarding the domestic division comprises three main areas: redirection of corporate clients business, streamlining the distribution network and new organisational and management structures.
One of the most important goals of the new domestic division is to make the business with corporate clients profitable, and central to the new strategy is to have a sharper focus on those customer relationships where there is an opportunity for building a broad-based, long-term partnership.
"In future, a corporate client with a high risk profile will have to pay significantly more than a customer who is deemed to be low risk," SBC said.
Cost-cutting will be achieved through a systematic management of the customer and product portfolios and the aim is to analyse the customer portfolio within the next 18 months and proceed with a segmentation.
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SBC currently has around 14,000 corporate clients, with a highly heterogeneous segmentation, requiring costly and time-consuming servicing.
In fact, some two-thirds of these customers have retail-type requirements and by applying the product standardisation and processes established in retail business, these clients can be serviced at significantly lower costs.
SBC expects that some 9,000 customers will, therefore, be transferred to existing Private and Business Clients segment, around 5,000 will be serviced by Corporate Clients segment.
Part of the upper range, however, is interested in sophisticated products and services from the investment banking area. These will be managed by the SBC Warburg division.