Pictet Group
The Pictet Group, known as Pictet, is a Swiss multinational private bank and financial services company founded in Switzerland. Headquartered in Geneva, it is one of the largest Swiss banks and primarily offers services in wealth management, asset management, and asset servicing, to private clients and institutions. The Pictet Group employs around 5,300 people, including 900 investment managers. It has a network of 30 offices in financial services centres, including registered banks in Geneva, Luxembourg, Nassau, Hong Kong and Singapore. Pictet does not engage in investment banking, nor does it extend commercial loans. According to its 2021 Annual Review, Pictet had CHF 638 billion ($ billion) of assets under management or custody, with its total capital ratio significantly exceeding the levels demanded by Swiss regulators. Banque Pictet & Cie SA is rated Prime-1/Aa2 by Moody's, and F1+/AA- by Fitch. History Pictet traces its origin to the foundation of Banque De Candolle Mallet & Cie in Geneva on 23 July 1805. On that day, Jacob-Michel-François de Candolle and Jacques-Henry Mallet signed, with three limited partners, a Scripte de Société (memorandum of association) to form a partnership. Like all Geneva banks at the time, it started out trading in goods but soon abandoned trading to concentrate on assisting clients in their financial and commercial business and advising them on managing their wealth. By the 1830s, it held a broad range of securities on behalf of clients, to diversify their risks. On the death of de Candolle in 1841, his wife’s nephew Edouard Pictet joined the partnership, and the name Pictet has remained with the bank ever since. Between 1890 and 1929, the Bank went through a period of substantial growth, the number of employees rising from 12 to more than 80 over 30 years. Although the Pictet family had been intimately engaged with the bank since the mid-19th century, it was only in 1926 that the company changed its name to Pictet & Cie. After a period of relative stagnation marked by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War, Pictet began to expand in the 1950s as the Western world entered a prolonged period of prosperity and economic growth. In the late 1960s, the Bank embarked on the new business of institutional asset management, which has since grown to account for around half of its total assets under management. In 1974, it opened an office in Montreal, the first of its current network of 28 offices around the world. Its workforce of 70 staff in 1950 rose to 300 by 1980. As of 2011, Pictet was Switzerland’s third largest wealth management company, and also one of Europe’s largest banks in private hands. In 2014, Pictet changed its legal structure from a simple partnership to become a corporate partnership (société en commandite par actions), which acts as a holding company for its global business. Pictet did not publish its annual results during its 209 years as a simple partnership, then published annual results for the first time upon becoming