Employees celebrate 15 years of Colin&Cie

Once a year, employees from all Colin&Cie locations come together for an offsite meeting to exchange ideas and cultivate a culture of cooperation and mutual support. This year's meeting took place in Zurich and was centred around the company's 15th anniversary.

                                                      The Colin&Cie staff at the WOW-Museum Zurich

The meeting point on the rooftop of "Talacker 50" offered the participants a magnificent view of the city on the Limmat, Lake Zurich and the mountain panorama beyond.

After the welcome address, founder and CEO Thomas Warnecke looked back on 15 years of Colin&Cie and used a few figures to illustrate how successfully the company has developed since 2009. When the first locations were opened in Zug and Schaffhausen, the business model consisted of two employees, focused exclusively on advising private clients from Switzerland and Germany and was based on a few investment strategies and cooperation with four custodian banks. 15 years later, Colin&Cie employs 45 people, 30 of whom work in client advisory services alone. With Zurich (2010), Luxembourg (2011) and Lugano (2016), there are now a total of five locations from which wealthy private clients and companies in Switzerland and numerous countries in the European Union are served. Around 1,000 implementation options based on a best-in-class approach are now available for the realisation of an individual investment strategy. The number of custodian banks has increased to 30. This makes Colin&Cie one of the largest and fastest growing asset managers in Switzerland and Luxembourg.

This very positive business development comes at a time when the financial sector has undergone a significant process of transformation and consolidation, the end of which is not yet in sight. In Switzerland alone, the number of banks has fallen by 35 per cent since 2009 and the number of external asset managers by as much as 60 per cent. Thomas Warnecke attributes several success factors to how Colin&Cie has managed to continue its growth in this challenging environment:

- Customer focus as a central element of an attractive service and business model

- High level of advisory and investment expertise and service quality

- Independence in advice and investment decisions

- Consistent realisation of the defined value proposition to clients and employees   

- Security for clients and employees thanks to full monitoring by supervisory authorities in Switzerland and the European Union

- Investment focus exclusively on achieving long-term goals

- Continuity in vision, objectives and strategy

The fact that it is worth sticking to your vision and goals with courage and motivation, creativity and perseverance was subsequently confirmed by Marc Hauser from Bern, the world record holder for the first jump into the jet stream from a height of 7,000 metres. To fulfil his childhood dream (to be able to fly like a bird), he overcame his limits (fear of heights), constantly faced new challenges and never lost faith in himself despite setbacks.

The participants spent the evening in the open air at the Frauenbad Stadthausquai on the Limmat. The popularly known "Frauenbadi" is only open to women during the day and is transformed into a great event location called the "Barfussbar" from 8 pm.

A visit to the WOW Museum and a city rally through the centre of Zurich the next day brought an eventful Offsite 2024 to a close, impressively demonstrating how valuable face-to-face interaction between colleagues outside of the office is in the age of video conferencing. Especially for a company like Colin&Cie, which is steadily gaining employees across its five locations in Switzerland and Luxembourg and has firmly anchored the implementation of values such as trust, open communication and mutual respect in its charter.