EFG International, the Swiss private banking giant, has announced that it will combine its legal and compliance functions into a single division under the leadership of Yves Aeschlimann, who will be the new Group Head of Legal & Compliance.

The changeover will take place on 1 May next year, subject to regulatory approval. Vittorio Ferrario, the Group Chief Compliance Officer, has decided to leave EFG at the end of March next year after having successfully supervised the bank's last efforts to integrate Banca della Svizzera Italiana or BSI, formerly the oldest bank in Italian-speaking Switzerland, which EFG acquired in 2016.

The Swiss financial regulator, FINMA, opened a formal investigation into the part that BSI played in the Brazilian corruption scandal surrounding Petrobras, the state oil company, sanctioning the bank in 2016. In May of that year it shut the bank down for “serious breaches of anti-money-laundering regulations” relating to the Malaysian 1MDB sovereign wealth fund.

EFG credits Ferrario with having "substantially strengthened EFG’s regulatory compliance framework."