It's surprising to me that people are still amazed at the fact that banks can go bust. It most definitely will not be the last time [a bank goes bust], it's a cyclical thing.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
“I try not to do stress.”
We had initially gone to Dubai to spend 4 years there. 4 years turned into 13. All in all can't complain, it's been a good couple of decades.
The challenge has been to maintain a good balance of finding stimulation at work, finding stimulation at home with your family, with your sports, with your activities and then obviously with your friendship. As you start to bring other elements into this equation, it becomes extremely complicated to find the right balance.
Sports [for me] has always been a huge part in terms of finding some kind of chemical balance I think there's a huge impact there.
It's important not to take yourself too seriously right?
If you were no longer around is your job that essential that there is a crisis and the answer - people will find alternative ways and the world continues to turn. So I think if you don't take yourself so seriously and sometimes have a little reality check it helps to deal with perceived stress. I try not to do stress.
I'm a bit of a stoic, so we don't do regrets, but learnings. There are too many learnings I think, to list them here.
“Retirement ever or never” – “Definitely ever. But I have a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to do, so it won't be retirement per se. But retirement from banking, yeah, that's coming up.”
ON TOPIC: Banking, private banking, neo banks, digital currencies, bank busts and more
The traditional model [of banking] is reaching the end of its journey.
When everybody knocks up, rocks up at your door and they want their cash at the same time the bank goes bust. It is honestly as simple as that. That is what happened to Credit Suisse.
We dealt with this in a very Swiss and pragmatic way: there's a bank run, it's Credit Suisse, okay UBS, you're buying them and that's just the end of it. And we will provide you with the necessary guarantees to do so please make sure it's done in 48 hours.
Some version of chat GPT whether it's 4 or 5 or 6 and they've already had some experiments will end up picking stocks way better than a human being.
AI will be able to process amounts of information that human beings are just not capable of doing and so I think that is going to make banks better, cheaper for the end user, right? And the winners will be those who will have invested and deployed this technology in an appropriate and applicable manner.
Crypto - I'm still not sure in the current state of things that it has any applicability whatsoever quite frankly.
Will we emerge from currency to some form of digital currency - one hundred percent we will and it's just a natural evolution of currency. We used to barter, and then used to use precious metals, and then currency came into effect, and then it was coins and bills, and all of that will disappear and it'll all be digitalized.
Does bitcoin take over from the US dollar and the Swissie? No I don't think so.
ON TOPIC: State of play for the world, geopolitics
Is it that the world is in a mess or is it that human beings are messy creatures?
Not to be cliché, but [the world] is getting more polarized at every level of society and in countries, exacerbated by social media.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
In life the most valuable thing that you could possibly have are friendships. And INSEAD has undoubtedly given me extremely precious friendships of people that are like-minded, generous, extremely intelligent and towards whom I've been able to turn for advice for real kind of genuine conversation over the years.