Credit Suisse Prime Brokerage Co-Heads to Leave Bank After Archegos Losses

Their departures come after Credit Suisse pushed out its top risk officer and the head of its investment bank this month. Several other employees working in equities and risk management also left.

Credit Suisse and other banks racked up heavy losses when Archegos, a U.S. family investment firm, couldn’t meet margin calls on large, concentrated stock positions at the end of March.

Credit Suisse was slow to unwind its positions compared with other banks and was left with the heftiest loss. It lent more to Archegos relative to its size than other lending banks, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

In addition to the staff departures, the bank has launched an internal investigation into what went wrong. A focus of the investigation has been on the bank’s prime brokerage unit, which managed the relationship with Archegos and allowed the investor to accumulate substantial leveraged positions in individual stocks.

Credit Suisse and other banks sold Archegos what are known as total return swaps, a type of contract that allows investors to have economic exposure to a stock without holding the underlying shares or disclosing their positions publicly to markets.

Write to Juliet Chung at juliet.chung@wsj.com and Margot Patrick at margot.patrick@wsj.com