The Swiss bank will support the issuance of products on a white-labelling basis via its multi-issuer platform.

Vontobel and Banque Cantonale Vaudoise (BCV) have entered into a strategic partnership for the white labelling of structured products.

The strategic cooperation covers the entire structured products value chain with BCV acting as issuer, and Vontobel taking responsibility for structuring, pricing, documentation, issuance, and lifecycle management.

This cooperation will help us to further grow Deritrade’s market share in French-speaking Switzerland - Markus Pfister

The partnership with BCV means gaining ‘another renowned issuer, which has a strong market position in the French-speaking region of Switzerland,’ said Markus Pfister (pictured), head of structured solutions & treasury at Vontobel.

‘This cooperation will help us to further grow Deritrade’s market share in French-speaking Switzerland and enhance its positioning,’ he said.

With effect from today (11 May), structured products issued by BCV will be available on Vontobel’s Deritrade expanding the platform’s issuer pool which includes Vontobel, J.P. Morgan, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, UBS, BNP Paribas, Basler Kantonalbank and Zürcher Kantonalbank.

‘The white-labelling partnership with Vontobel allows us to offer a fully digitalized offering across the entire lifecycle of a structured product,’ said Eric Vauthey, head of trading at BCV. ‘This pioneering cooperation is a perfect fit for our strategic focus [as] numerous Swiss banks and external asset managers can gain fully-automated access to our structured products.’

Vontobel reported earlier this year that more than 100 banks, 460 external asset managers (EAMs) and 5,500 users transact structured products via Deritrade.

The Swiss bank’s new operating model launched at the end of 2019 and implemented by the end of the first quarter of 2020 saw its advisory teams bundled within specialised client units.

In 2020, Vontobel expanded its market position for structured and leverage products in Switzerland and other European markets. In Switzerland, it increased its market share for investment products to 23.6% (from 23.3% the previous year) while it held 43.9% of the market for leverage products (2019: 40.9%), making it the number one issuer in both categories.

According to SRP data, Vontobel issued 14,652 structured products (including 12,450 reverse convertibles), 7,622 leverage products and almost 115,000 open-ended turbos in its domestic market in 2020. YTD, the bank has marketed over 800 structures.

BCV appears as the issuer of almost 700 products and the distributor of more than 2,000 products sold in Switzerland of which 83 are still live.