For Peter Conrad, banking was never just about numbers. It was about people, places, and the courage to start over, again and again. Over 37 years in global finance, he turned that courage into a career that took him from Zurich to Rome, Hong Kong, Monaco, and Tokyo.
At Franklin's latest Meet the Manager event, the Next in Management team together with Prof. Ana Kurtanidze, welcomed Peter Conrad, a senior private banker, who worked through some of the toughest periods in modern finance. His story began in the late 1980s, when a family crisis and a tight budget almost kept him out of the industry. A 20 minute interview changed everything. Throughout the presentation, he always returned to one simple message: say yes.
Saying yes took him far. When UBS asked him to support the profitability in Italy, a market close to breaking even, he accepted. Italy became the bank's first profitable market internationally. When they offered Hong Kong, a city where he had no connections and no language skills, he accepted again. He arrived right when China’s economy was growing fast, bringing new companies every month.
Success never came without challenges. The 2008 financial crisis had a strong impact: colleagues lost their jobs, clients left in anger, and Conrad's own shares dropped from seven to one. UBS had to be rescued by the Swiss government, something he described as deeply difficult for the Swiss mindset. But rather than let the crisis define him, he used it as a reason to keep going. For Conrad, challenges are not endings but proof that nothing is permanent.
At 39, he found himself running an entire bank in Monaco, where he quickly had to figure out how to manage everything, from dealing with local authorities to calming down some very wealthy and angry clients. When the chance came to move again, he picked Tokyo over Australia. Japan had been on his mind since his first visit in 1986 with his father, and living there turned out to be everything he had hoped for. He calls it the event of his life. What stayed with him most was the mindset: the humility, the patience, the idea that you don't need to have it all to be happy.
Today, Peter Conrad is Head of Private Banking at PKB, a family-owned private bank in Lugano, where he knows every colleague by name. The environment, he says, is deeply human.
Conrad's journey is a reminder that a career is rarely straight and simple. For students thinking about their own futures, his message was clear: stay curious, accept the unexpected, and trust that the hardest moments often turn out to be the most valuable ones.
"Money comes and goes," he told the student. "Your brain will stay."