Credit Suisse CEO believes in the Future

Credit Suisse Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam sees market conditions improving during 2017 as the bank's reorganization gathers pace and its efficiency drive continues.

Thiam told Bloomberg TV in an interview from Davos on Tuesday that "After a year in 2016 where you saw revenues really go down (across the sector)…hopefully 2017 will be better but all this is markets permitting," he said. "Certainty we see a strength in fixed income, you can see that. You can see the securitized products market going. You can see generally global credit products growing. You can see leveraged finance still at a reasonable level of activity," he said, while the equities business would have a "reasonable" year.

Then, Thiam Thiam was joined on a panel entitled "Size Matters: The Future of Big Business", he focused on the role of the bank in the society, explained "We have seen across the world the benefits of globalization…but we have also seen the tensions. The cracks in the system which then found a political translation," said the CEO of Switzerland's second-largest bank.

Explaining that business had done a poor job of communicating the delivery of its benefits to broader society, Thiam added, "we have to behave better…and become more effective at articulating what we do and the positive things we do."

According to Credit Suisse's Thiam, banks still have work to do to in order to convince a skeptical public of their beneficial role in society.

"We took for granted for a long time that we had a licence to operate, that society wanted big companies to exist and I think under the pressure of the financial crisis and the spread of information via social media, that mandate is getting weaker and weaker," he explained.