Sanzone, 47, joins Merrill Lynch as executive vice president (EVP) and chief administrative officer (CAO). His position at Credit Suisse will be filled by Karl Landert, most recently head of IT for the Swiss bank's private banking business.

At Merrill, Sanzone will be responsible for global client services and operations, technology applications development and infrastructure, business process and sourcing strategies, information securit and global real estate, purchasing and services.

Sanzone joined Credit Suisse as CIO in 2005 and is thought to be largely responsible for expanding the bank's offshoring programme in recent years.

During his tenure at Credit Suisse the bank has expanded its offshore operations in Singapore, adding a third unit in 2006 and increasing the number of Credit Suisse staff in the city state to around 3600.

The bank has also outsourced its entire telecommunications infrastructure to BT and last year was rumoured to be looking to outsource over half of the 5000 IT jobs at its operations in Switzerland to cheaper offshore centres.

Prior to his role at Credit Suisse, Sanzone was chief information officer for Citigroup's corporate and investment bank, as well as the Private Client Group and global transaction services business.

Sanzone began his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984 as a programmer analyst in the mortgage trading systems area. In 1991 he was appointed senior operating officer for fixed income and equity sales trading and in 1996 was named managing director and head of global application development.

In a separate move Nels Marin - who was most recently director of strategy for the North American infrastructure group at Citigroup - has been named to the advisory council of the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI).

Prior to his role at Citigroup Marin was global head of infrastructure for Barclays Capital. He also served as managing director and head of global infrastructure for Credit Suisse for 16 years.

CSI was established in 2007 by Stuart Cohen, a former chief executive officer at the Open Source Development Labs. Cohen has partnered with Evan Bauer, a former chief technology officer at Credit Suisse, to collaborate with companies to build software applications.

In his new role Marin will be responsible for strategy and business development for CSI's financial sector activities.

Commenting on the new appointment Cohen says CSI has responded to the requests of Wall Street banks that wanted to collaborate on certain compliance projects and the sector has become an important focus for the company.

"We wanted to add someone to the advisory council who was strategic and technical as well as knowledgeable about the compliance and regulatory challenges the financial industry faces," adds Choen.