CREDIT SUISSE Group AG brushed off the gloom in European bank earnings as wealthy clients added new money and revenue from securities trading rose in a quarter in which peers posted declines.

The results confirmed resilience in the bank’s key businesses following Chief Executive Officer Tidjane Thiam’s three-year turnaround. Healthy inflows of 9.5 billion francs ($9.6 billion) into wealth management contrast with outflows at rival UBS Group AG. In the trading units, fixed income revenue gained 6%, more than offsetting a 1% drop in equities.

Six months after emerging from Thiam’s painful turnaround, an industrywide slump in trading and the prospect of lower interest rates for longer are testing Credit Suisse’s new business model. The CEO has pivoted the bank away from volatile investment banking and more toward wealth management, particularly in Asia, where most of the world’s millionaires are created.

“It’s been a good quarter for us,” Thiam said in an interview. The environment “is very difficult, every quarter has been really mixed.”

Shares of Credit Suisse rose 2.8% at 9:20 a.m. in Zurich, bringing gains this year to 11%.

Thiam has held off on drastic job cuts announced this year by competitors including Deutsche Bank AG and Societe Generale SA. Credit Suisse said it saw “healthy levels of client engagement” so far this quarter, contrasting with warnings from peers that clients were staying on the sidelines and lower rates would hurt income from lending. Thiam had earlier forecast that he was “cautiously optimistic” on the three-months through June.

SHARING COSTS
“Negative interest rates are a challenge,” Thiam said in the interview with Bloomberg TV’s Francine Lacqua. Credit Suisse will announce some measures in August to change pricing and protect income from lending, he said.

Like rival UBS Group AG, Thiam’s bank has to pay the Swiss National Bank to park excess cash at home, but it’s less affected than its larger neighbor by the reversal in US interest rates expectations, after exiting its US private banking operations in 2015.

The two bank have been exploring options to share back office costs, people familiar with the matter said last year. Thiam confirmed those discussions on Wednesday, saying they continue and make good progress.

BEATING PEERS
Net income at Credit Suisse rose 45% to 937 million francs, beating the analyst consensus of 788 million francs in a survey done by the bank. Credit Suisse said it has bought back 570 million francs from a total of a planned 1 billion francs of shares this year.

At the global markets unit, revenue from fixed income trading rose 11% when reported in US dollars, and equities trading gained 3%. The bank benefited from its skew towards fixed-income trading, which held up better across the industry. In Asia, fixed income trading slumped 29% and equities trading fell 9%.

Wall Street peers recorded 8% lower equities revenue and a 7% drop in fixed income, adjusting for a one-time effect. At local rival UBS, equities fell 9% and fixed income 7%. Only France’s BNP Paribas SA recorded similar gains as Credit Suisse, with debt trading revenue rising almost 9% in the second quarter. — Bloomberg

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