For his second act after more than 30 years, Juerg Zeltner chose what he called his «boyhood dream»: putting his own money to work as an entrepreneur in the industry he knew best, private banking.

Qatar’s ruling al-Thani family, who were Zeltner’s clients at UBS, gave him the chance. Zeltner and a few close associates including Jakob Stott, who will succeed him, put money into a vehicle set up to share profits from KBL, a bank the al-Thanis had in 2011 swooped in to buy for 1.05 billion euros ($1.2 billion) from troubled Belgian KBC.

Zeltner, just 41 when he was promoted to co-head of UBS’ flagship private bank in the midst of the biggest crisis in the Swiss lender’s history in 2009, lent considerable star power to KBL, which he renamed Quintet. He clinched several hundred million more from the al-Thanis and got to work.

Grand 2020 Plans

On Monday, the family said it remains committed to the strategic plan laid out by Zeltner last March. It was Zeltner’s «pull» behind the hire of dozens of bankers and executives – many of them his former associates at UBS.

Zeltner was to have been the guiding spirit to nurse Quintet back to health (subsidiary Merck Finck, an 149-year-old Munich wealth manager, remains loss-making despite a two-year revamp, for example). His untimely death, reportedly following a brain tumor, comes as the bank expands in Switzerland, through a soon-to-conclude acquisition, and in the Nordics.

Slimming Europe Structure

A spokesman for Quintet, which owns wealth managers in the U.K., Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Holland, and Germany, said it is very well-positioned for capital and liquidity. «The firm’s shareholders have injected significant fresh capital over the last six months to support our growth ambitions.»

This year, many of the bank’s newly-hired private bankers were to have begun – meaning assets would likely come in. In parallel, Zeltner had begun rolling out plans to revamp Quintet’s decentralized structure around three countries in Europe: Luxembourg, the U.K., and Switzerland.

Crisis «Run on UBS»

It falls to Stott as well as other close allies including operating chief Colin Price and Swiss boss Dagmar Kamber-Borens to follow through on the plans. Quintet’s prospects for doing so in a market where wealthy clients are scrambling to meet their margin calls as they unwind their leverage is uncertain, at best.

Zeltner, one of the world’s best-known private bankers, was battle-hardened in the eight years he ran UBS’ private bank. His promotion to that job in 2009 was baptism by fire: Zeltner pulled out all the stops including slashing fees to prevent a «run on the bank,» he told «Euromoney» in 2014.

Pugnacious Leader

Three years and many concessions to clients later, he had stanched the damage at 250 billion Swiss francs in withdrawals. This, he noted in 2014, was the equivalent to a mid-sized wealth manager (by contrast, Quintet manages roughly $82 billion).

In the process, Zeltner emerged as a much more mature leader: never one to shy from a fight at UBS, he engendered enormous loyalty from his troops.

Quintet now faces a similar challenge as UBS, but without the solid footing the Swiss bank enjoyed before the crisis – and without Zeltner, who passed away on Sunday at 52. He is survived by a wife and two children.