Chief of Staff, Western Markets & Switzerland

I treat every outcome like it's mine.

Coordinating product launches across teams, following up on a single process that fell through the cracks, my instinct is the same:

It's not done until it's done right. "Not my problem" is not in my vocabulary.

That instinct is why I'm applying for this role; and why I believe 2.5 years of full ownership at high-growth companies, a BSc with honours from EHL, and a CFA Level I candidacy have prepared me for the CoS team, despite not holding a Master's degree.

Why wealth management

My father spent two decades in senior private banking roles, including as CEO of Julius Baer's Middle East & India Sub-Continent.

I grew up watching what it looks like when someone's work is built entirely on trust. I saw what happens when a client calls at 11 pm or at 11 am: my father took the call. Because the relationship meant something to him. That left a mark long before I knew it was there. Because I resisted following his path for a long time.

I wanted to prove I could build something on my own terms first. And I did: in marketing, in growth, in startups. I'm glad I did, because those years taught me how to execute, build systems from nothing, and earn trust without the weight of a title.

But the more I built, the more I recognised my intellectual energy lives where deep analysis meets human consequence: where the quality of your thinking directly affects people, their future, and trust in the institution you represent.

Why Julius Baer

Julius Baer's positioning is why I'm writing this page for this firm, not another.

Pure-play wealth management, open architecture, no corporate banking conflicts.

It's the clearest expression of what private banking should be. The Italy onshore expansion, the emphasis on entrepreneurial RMs, the willingness to invest in growth markets...

These are strategic choices I want to be close to.

And Julius Baer's values aren't aspirational; they are how I was taught to work.

EHL trained me in a tradition where service excellence is the baseline, where anticipating someone's needs before they ask is a discipline, and where rigour in the details is how you earn the right to be trusted with the big picture.

That tradition maps directly onto what private banking demands.

How I work

Before I walk through the role's challenges, three things that won't fit neatly into a bullet point.

Ownership

I don't manage tasks; I own outcomes.

At Feather, I built the entire content function from zero: strategy, production, distribution, and measurement. When the organic channel became the company's largest acquisition source, instead of celebrating the metric, I spent the next month building the processes to prevent it from breaking at scale.

An employee hits the KPI and moves on. An owner asks: "What's the next thing that could go wrong?"

Service

At Feather, I noticed our support team was fielding the same complex insurance questions repeatedly.

Over 6 weeks, I wrote 35+ explainer articles from the customer's perspective. Ticket volume on those topics dropped by over 40%.

That's service-first instinct: you notice the gap between what someone's experiencing and what they deserve, and you close it.

Rigour

I'm pursuing the CFA Level I on my own time and at my own expense, because I don't want to work in an industry I haven't studied rigorously.

That's how I'm wired: the standard I hold myself to doesn't adjust based on what's expected of me.

The role's six challenges

1. Support strategic initiatives, coordinating across teams and functions

The CoS team sits at the intersection of every function in the region: dependencies surfaced before they become bottlenecks, owners accountable, and leadership with a single view of where things stand.

This is where my experience is most directly transferable.

I coordinated simultaneous expansion into 12 EU markets at Feather, serving as a liaison between engineering, product, legal, compliance, and marketing. No formal authority over any of those teams, yet nine product launches shipped on time.

What made it work was trust, follow-through, and knowing when to push.

After the Razor x Perch merger ($1.7B), I took ownership of the CRM migration of 1M+ customer accounts across engineering, marketing, and product. The hardest part wasn't the technical complexity; it was getting five teams to agree on priorities when everyone had competing deadlines.

2. Quantitative & qualitative analyses for projects

Quantitative

I built the cost-benefit model that informed a €250k investment decision at Feather.

For IWC, I ran NLP analysis on 10,000+ customer reviews to surface product improvement opportunities at scale.

The CFA is further deepening this toolkit.

Qualitative

At Feather, I designed and ran user research studies using structured interviews, a screener, and affinity diagramming.

For Tag Heuer, I conducted interviews with customers, collectors, and journalists to identify the root causes of underperformance in China.

Storytelling

300+ hours of tutoring in finance at EHL. When I explain WACC to a 19-year-old who has never read a balance sheet, I can't hide behind jargon.

The same principle applies to a CoS brief: if the analysis doesn't make the "so what" unmissable, it's not done the job.

3–6. KPIs, presentations, communication, and marketing

The remaining four challenges are areas where I have direct, daily experience:

KPI frameworks

At Razor, I built reporting across 9 DTC brands with traffic-light indicators and exception-based commentary.

At Feather, I designed SQL-based dashboards tracking pipelines that the business had never measured before.

The best report is one page answering:

1. Where are we vs. the plan?
2. What's working?
3. What needs intervention?

Presentations

Our team was ranked #1 by TAG Heuer's regional board for a presentation on HNW client acquisition in the Chinese market.

What won was understanding the board wanted a clear recommendation they could act on that afternoon.

Front-office communication

At Feather, I managed 5 external agencies and 3 freelancers simultaneously, building the entire coordination system from scratch: briefing templates, quality control, follow-up cadences.

Strong communication distills what happened, what it means, and what needs to happen next, in under two minutes.

Marketing

I led the content strategy that drove +150% organic traffic growth in 14 months at Feather.

The CoS lens I'd bring: "Is this campaign generating qualified leads that convert to onboarded clients within six months, and at what cost per CHF of NNM?"

Profile requirements

Financial industry experience

I haven't worked in a bank. This is a gap I take seriously, and I've worked to close it from multiple directions:

• Documenting my preparation for the CFA Level I (November 2026) on this site.
• 300+ hours tutoring finance at EHL with a >95% student pass rate.
• Financial modelling in practice (investment scenario modelling at Razor, profitability analysis of IWC's sales training programme, etc.)

Languages

Native English, native French, German A2 (actively progressing).

I moved to an English-speaking school in Dubai at 13, not speaking a word of the language; by year 11, I had some of the best grades in my class in English literature and history.

German is next.

Technical skills

Advanced Excel, Intermediate Python, VBA, and SQL.

I think in systems.

When my instinct is to automate, so the team's hours go toward analysis and judgment instead of data-pulling.

Work samples

Below are two deliverables I'd produce in this role: built the way I've learned to build things: researching, structuring, and producing.

1. Italy onshore market entry: the CoS brief

Scenario:
Julius Baer received regulatory approval in March 2025 to enter the Italian onshore market through a Milan branch, led by Roberto Coletta.

This is the brief I'd prepare for Carlos Recoder and Thomas Frauenlob.

What makes Italy different

Three elements create coordination challenges different from Dublin or Madrid:

A. Dual-jurisdiction supervision.

The Milan branch is regulated by CONSOB (securities) and Banca d'Italia (prudential), while the parent entity is CSSF-regulated in Luxembourg.

Compliance decisions require three-way coordination.

AML/KYC follows Decreto Legislativo 231/2007. Cross-border advisory permissions between Milan and Luxembourg must be watertight.

The critical-path dependency: Nothing launches until CONSOB registration clears.

B. The flat tax channel.

Italy's flat tax on foreign-sourced income for new residents (€200,000/year, up to 15 years, requires 9/10 years of non-Italian tax residency) creates a specific (U)HNW acquisition channel.

But it requires dedicated onboarding, including coordination with Group Tax, Legal, the CIO Office, and external Italian tax counsel for the mandatory interpello (advance ruling). The advisory process starts months before any AuM arrives.

If this workflow isn't built before launch, we lose the segment.

C. Competitive timing.

The Mediobanca–Banca Generali merger (€6.3B, Italy's 2nd wealth manager by 2027) is reshuffling the market.

Client relationships are in flux. RMs at both firms are reachable.

JB's positioning must be articulated from day one:

• Pure-play wealth management
• Open architecture
• No corporate banking conflicts

Launch Scorecard

The monthly one-pager for regional leadership.

*Illustrative. Targets would be set with Finance and the Branch Head, based on the RM pipeline and market sizing.

Any escalation trigger generates a one-page root-cause memo:

• What happened
• Why
• Corrective action
• Owner
• Deadline.

Cross-Functional Dependencies

Cross-Border Referral Angle

The Italy launch means an opportunity for regional NNM. Every RM should know about it.

I'd send a quarterly update to regional RMs with three referral hooks:

1. Flat tax structuring for clients considering Italian residency
2. Intergenerational wealth advisory for clients with Italian family wealth (€300B+ in succession transfers this decade)
3. Italian asset management for clients with existing Italian holdings.

Simple process: email the Milan referral inbox, response within 48 hours, NNM credit follows existing cross-border protocol.

2. Client attrition root-cause analysis

Scenario:
Regional leadership flags client attrition in the Swiss HNW segment (CHF 2–25M AuM) has increased from 3.2% to 4.8% over four quarters.

The CoS team is asked to identify root causes and recommend corrective actions.

Most analysts would pull the data and build a slide deck. That answers what is happening. It doesn't answer why. To answer both, you need two methods and a framework for combining them.

Quantitative method: statistical attrition model

Build two matched cohorts from the CRM: churned clients (trailing 12 months, HNW tier) vs. a retained comparison group matched by AuM, tenure, and product type.

Profile both across the variables most likely to predict attrition: portfolio return vs. benchmark, RM touchpoint frequency, fee level, advisory mandate penetration, RM changes, and product breadth.

Test whether the differences are real. Two-sample t-tests for continuous, chi-square for categorical. Then build a multivariate regression (individual tests tell you what's significant in isolation; regression tells you what matters after controlling for everything else):

Attrition̂ = β₀ + β₁(RM_Touchpoints) + β₂(Return_vs_Benchmark) + β₃(Fee_%) + β₄(Mandate_Type) + β₅(Tenure) + β₆(RM_Changed) + ε

If β₆ = 0.18 and p < 0.01, an RM reassignment increases attrition probability by 18 percentage points, holding all else equal. That's actionable. But the model identifies correlation. Causation is where qualitative methods come in.

Output: Apply the model to the current client book. Flag clients above the 75th percentile of predicted attrition probability. Deliver a prioritised at-risk list for each RM, sorted by estimated AuM at risk.

Qualitative method: structured exit interviews

The regression might flag RM changes as the strongest predictor. But what about RM changes causes clients to leave?

Data can't answer this. Conversations can.

12–15 semi-structured exit interviews, stratified by tenure, departure type, and AuM tier. The key methodological principle: never ask people to rationalise their decisions in the abstract. Instead, ask them to reconstruct specific events: "At what point did you first start thinking about whether to stay?" identifies the inciting moment, often months before departure.

Synthesise via affinity diagramming. Code each insight. When 11 of 14 participants mention a communication gap following an RM change, it's a pattern.

Where the two methods meet

If the regression flags RM_Changed as the strongest predictor, and the interviews reveal that the problem isn't the change itself but the absence of a structured handover (no introductory call, no portfolio review, no acknowledgement that the relationship matters), then we have both the what and the why.

The recommendation writes itself.

Deliverable: departure archetypes. Synthesise findings into 3–4 profiles. Example:

"The Underserved Loyalist"

Tenure 5+ years. CHF 5–15M. High satisfaction historically. Departed after RM reassignment with no structured handover — 2–3 month communication vacuum.

"Performance was fine, but I left because after my advisor changed. Nobody called me for months."

Intervention: Mandatory 30/60/90-day touchpoint protocol following any RM reassignment. CoS monitors compliance via CRM activity logs.

Final output: a 20-page report + 2-page executive summary. The quantitative section delivers the what. The qualitative section delivers the why. Together, recommendations with both data credibility and human insight.

Let's talk

The work samples aim to demonstrate something a Master's thesis can't: the ability to research a live business problem, develop an approach, and deliver a solution teams can act on.

That's what 2.5 years of operational experience teaches you.

I'd welcome the chance to walk through them in person.

My CV is attached below.

Theo Leimer leimertheomax@gmail.com | +41 79 896 1238