Notenstein La Roche Private Bank

Notenstein La Roche Privatbank AG
Country	Switzerland
Seat	St. Gallen
legal form	Corporation
IID	8765
BIC	WEGECH2GXXX
founding	1968 (founded); 2012 (name change)
resolution	2018

The Notenstein La Roche Privatbank AG (until November 2015 only Notenstein Privatbank AG ) was a Swiss private bank with headquarters in St. Gallen and 16.8 billion francs assets under management. The private bank, which has been part of the Raiffeisen Group since 2012 , was sold to Bank Vontobel in July 2018 and fully integrated at the end of September 2018.

Services

Notenstein La Roche Privatbank specialized in comprehensive asset management for private customers. The core area of expertise of Notenstein La Roche Privatbank was asset management and investment advice, financial and pension planning, financing and the support of external asset managers.

history

At the end of 2015, Notenstein Privatbank and Bank La Roche merged. The two banks can look back on centuries of history. The story of the Notensteiners began in St. Gallen, that of La Roche in Basel. The two banks not only share history and tradition, but also fundamental values and business ethics.

Notenstein

St. Gallen owed its economic boom in the late Middle Ages to the flourishing textile industry. The owners of the large long-distance trading houses gathered in the house "zum Nothveststein" on the lower Neugasse, from 1555 at the current location of the private bank at Brühltor. The influential Notensteiners together with the guilds provided the city government. St. Gallen's famous polymath and mayor Joachim von Watt, known as Joachim Vadian , was also a Notensteiner.

In 1741 Caspar Zyli, scion of an old Notensteiner family, founded a forwarding and trading company. This developed into a pure banking institution by the middle of the 19th century. With the invasion of the French army in 1798, the old social order also came to an end and the Gesellschaft zum Notenstein was dissolved.

From 1893 the former "Caspar Zyli" traded under the name "Wegelin & Co.". The following generations of shareholders managed to successfully lead the bank through the 20th century despite international wars and crises. In 2012, Wegelin's non-US business was transferred to the newly founded Notenstein Private Bank.

La Roche

At the end of the 18th century, Basel was an internationally networked trading city in which the silk ribbon industry had developed into the most important economic sector. In this environment, Benedikt La Roche, whose great-grandfather had earned the honorary name of "La Roche" while serving in the war for the French crown, founded a trading and shipping company in 1787.

After overcoming the economic crisis around 1800, the banking branch of «Handlung» was steadily expanded due to the growing capital requirements of industry. Up until the end of the century, La Roche was involved in a wide variety of projects, such as the financing of the “Spanish bread train” or a beer brewery. The German-French War of 1870 made the financial center of Basel international. During this time, the bank was one of the founders of the Basel Stock Exchange. While the period between the two world wars was a difficult environment, the bank experienced growth and prosperity in the period that followed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the company made the transition to the classic private bank; Investment advice, asset management and looking after institutional customers became the core business. In 2012 the bank celebrated its 225th anniversary.

Wegelin & Co.

The origin of the bank dates back to 1741. In that year Caspar Zyli (1717–1758) took over his father's cloth business and the shipping company in St. Gallen. Like many trading houses at that time, the Zylis company was not only active in freight forwarding, but also handled banking transactions. In 1802 his son Hans Anton bought the "Nothveststein" building. The seat of the bank is still located here today. In 1860 Emil Wegelin-Wild, Zyli's nephew, became a partner in the bank. Under him, the business began to focus on asset management. In 1893 the name of the private bank was changed to Wegelin & Co.

At the beginning of 2012, Wegelin & Co. came under the US judiciary's sights in the context of the tax dispute between the USA and the Swiss banks. The shareholders decided to split the company on January 27, 2012. While the business with customers from the USA and US citizens remained with Wegelin & Co. (around 5 percent), the other customers and business areas as well as almost all of the staff were transferred to Notenstein Privatbank. The transaction was made easier by the fact that a second banking license and naming rights were already in place: For example, Notenstein was created through the transfer of the non-US business to Nettobank AG , a sister company of Wegelin & Co. at the time. It was then renamed. The naming rights of the new Notenstein Private Bank come from the real estate company Notenstein AG, which was founded in 1968, a subsidiary of Bank Wegelin & Co.