Menu

Portrait of Daniel Glasner, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Action Finance

During his youth, Daniel Glasner lived on three different continents, which required him to integrate into various cultures, master several languages and adapt to successive changes in residence.

In 1975, he began his studies at the University of Lausanne and obtained in 1979 a Master of Arts (MA) in Political Science, followed in 1980 by a Master of Science (MSc) delivered by the Business School (HEC Lausanne).

In 1981, he left Geneva to work in Chicago in the area of finance and in the currency markets for a Wall Street firm and learned the new risk hedging techniques developed in the futures and options markets; this knowledge led him to pursue a career in the area of property refinancing in the USA as well as the purchase of distressed businesses. He returned to Switzerland in 1987 to work for a Swiss bank.

At the request of the senior management of a major Swiss bank in Basel, and in order to directly respond to the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry, he set up “market-making” operations for currency options and a service for processing in transactions in financial futures. Seeing that the competition in this area was only going to increase, he decided to distance himself from trading and its screens in order to devote himself entirely to wealth management.

In 1993, he returned to Geneva and participated in the management of currency risk for two major mutual funds, formed by a newly merged private bank. Two years later he seized the opportunity to transform a well-known independent wealth manager, owned by a well-known Swiss auditing firm, into a securities dealer pursuant to the new Swiss Federal Act on Stock Exchanges and Securities Trading (SESTA). This experience drove him in 1999, as the Chief Executive Officer, to transform over 4 years a securities dealer under the SESTA so that it could apply for and receive a banking license from the Swiss Federal Banking Commission (which has since been replaced by FINMA, the Swiss financial market supervisory authority).

Since 2004, Daniel Glasner has provided independent wealth managers and smaller banks with advice on strategy, restructuring and in mergers and acquisitions. He delivers and actively manages turnkey wealth management companies. He principally concerns himself with the regulatory, governance, compliance (including risk management), logistics organizational and banking aspects; in addition he intervenes if necessary in the front office activities in order to meet or develop relations with the clientele.

As the former Chairman and an honorary member of the Swiss Association of Independent Financial Advisers (SAIFA), Daniels Glasner work tirelessly to ensure that independent wealth managers obtained the status of “qualified investor” in 2007, he has since continued to contribute to shaping the future of the profession of independent financial advisor in Switzerland.

Daniel Glasner supports and dedicates a portion of his time to NGOs which are concerned with social, economic and cultural development of women and girls around the world