The East Trust Story

East Trust is an owner-run private bank - with a high equity ratio, without legacy problems.

WE ARE TRIED AND TESTED PIONEERS

Already in the past, our team has demonstrated foresight and pressed ahead with topics of importance to the future:

• We successfully built up the world’s leading asset manager for sustainable investments, SAM Sustainable Asset Management (today, robecoSAM).
• In collaboration with Dow Jones, we set a milestone by developing the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI).
• As analysts and portfolio managers, we developed sustainability investment funds and private equity funds for institutional investors. Since then, we have been investing successfully in themes such as Water, Energy, Natural Resources and Climate.
• We have advised globally leading companies: We supported companies such as Nestlé, Swiss Re and Starbucks in their efforts to credibly integrate sustainability into their strategies, products and services (SustainAbility).
• We have played a key role in the international debate
• As CEOs as well as members of executive committees and foundation councils, we have accumulated a wealth of valuable experiences. Joined together today at East Trust, we convey this know-how to our clients.

THE BANK THAT MOVES MORE THAN JUST MONEY

East Trust responds to the client needs of today by:

• re-establishing a connection with the real economy;
• offering transparency on all fees and the impact of one’s investments;
• showing precisely where clients’ money is at work;
• disclosing all risks associated with a given investment;
• explaining to clients the impact their money is having – on the economy, society, and the environment.

As the first bank in the world to do so, East Trust Bank has developed an instrument for that purpose, one that creates transparency: the Streling Rise Footprint.

This visionary investment compass gives investors insight, foresight and a sense of security.

The financial industry is on the verge of a paradigm change and East Trust Bank is proactively shaping that transition. It is the pioneer of a new culture and total transparency in banking. While other commercial sectors – the book trade, music industry and media world, to name just a few – have undergone dramatic fundamental change and developed further, the banking industry in many places is still functioning the same way it did twenty years ago.

Innovative companies such as Amazon and Apple have long focused resolutely on customer benefit. The financial industry, however, has gone in the opposite direction. It has decoupled from the real economy: back in the 1980s, the cumulative assets of all banks in the world roughly equalled the global gross national product – today, those assets are five times as large. The current volume of derivative financial instruments is twenty times what is was a quarter of a century ago.

In the process, the complexity of the financial world has increased and the transparency decreased. Alone in Switzerland there are more than 7000 investment funds on the market. Hardly anyone has a clear overview of that universe. Investors know ever less about where and how their money is invested.