17 Mar 2021
Avaloq announces leadership change 
  • Avaloq’s CEO Juerg Hunziker has decided to step down from his role as of 1 April 2021, and will stay on with the company as a Senior Advisor
  • Current Group Executive Board members Martin Greweldinger and Thomas Beck have been appointed as co-CEOs
  • Avaloq will further accelerate its growth strategy to enhance its core and specialized digital products delivering greater advisory experiences

Juerg Hunziker is stepping down as CEO on 31 March 2021. He joined Avaloq in 2016 and assumed the CEO role in 2018. Armed with 30 years of experience in developing financial technology companies, he transformed Avaloq from a founder-driven firm to a mature, scalable business. His efforts culminated in Avaloq’s acquisition by NEC at the end of last year. Following his personal decision to withdraw from the CEO role at the end of March 2021, he will focus on interaction with existing and prospective clients of Avaloq as its Senior Advisor to the Group Executive Board. 

From 1 April 2021, current Group Executive Board members Martin Greweldinger, Group Chief Product Officer, and Thomas Beck, Group Chief Technology and Group Chief Service Delivery Officer, will become co-CEOs of Avaloq. 

This change ensures leadership continuity following Avaloq’s recent acquisition by NEC Corporation, a global leader in the integration of IT and network technologies. Avaloq is also positioning itself for further growth by facilitating the digital transformation of client firms and responding to global demand that has accelerated in the last 12 months. The company continues to invest in its leading core banking platform and will further scale the recently launched core-agnostic products – Avaloq Wealth, Avaloq Engage and Avaloq Insight. These award-winning solutions form the cornerstone of a product offering that helps banks satisfy client needs in this new era. As client expectations increase, Avaloq is setting financial industry standards with easy-to-use systems that minimize manual work and deliver unrivalled reliability and straight-through-processing. It is helping to democratize wealth management and empower the financial sector by automating operations through scalable services and leading cloud-based software solutions delivered “as a Service”.

Juerg Hunziker, CEO of Avaloq, said: “First and foremost, I would like to thank all Avaloq employees for their dedication and hard work not only during this past year, which was an exceptional one in many ways, but also during prior years, which laid the foundation for where we are today. I followed the success story of Avaloq almost since its inception, and I consider being part of this company a true honour. Avaloq is the rare kind of company you want to work for because of its continuous ability to reinvent itself. However, I have now come to a point in my life where it is time to reinvent myself, too. I will remain dedicated in driving Avaloq to further growth, and I look forward once again to being able to spend more time with existing and future clients, which is my passion.”

Masakazu Yamashina, Executive Vice President of NEC and Chairman of Avaloq, said: “I would like to sincerely thank Juerg for his hard and successful work and enormous commitment over the past years. He significantly contributed to transforming Avaloq into the mature and scalable business it is today, and which NEC decided to invest in. In addition, he contributed to building Avaloq’s exceptional talent pool that we can now directly benefit from. I am glad that Juerg remains with Avaloq in a Senior Advisory role, and that we will be able to continue to benefit from his expertise and strong relationships with clients. At the same time, I am delighted that, with Martin and Thomas, we have co-CEOs who know Avaloq inside out and who enjoy the full trust of Avaloq’s Board of Directors as they take the company into its next chapter of growth by producing meaningful synergies with NEC.”

Martin Greweldinger, Group Chief Product Officer and new co-CEO of Avaloq, said: “I am very much looking forward to advancing a new era of Avaloq in alliance with NEC. I feel very honoured to lead this company together with Thomas. Not long ago Avaloq successfully launched its core-agnostic platforms, and I will focus on providing banks with access to these innovative solutions so they can deliver exceptional wealth management services in today’s world. I also look forward to driving innovation throughout the whole organization, including client-facing functions, internal operations and finance.”

Thomas Beck, Group Chief Technology Officer, Group Chief Service Delivery Officer and new co-CEO of Avaloq, said: “Co-CEO is always a special setup and with Martin I could not wish for a better partner at my side. My goal is to leverage what we did within the technology teams over the past few years – transforming it into a truly agile organization – to bring the entire architecture together with cloud technology. I am very excited about the next chapter in Avaloq’s history as it will be one of accelerated growth and unequivocal focus on client-centricity.”