Credit Suisse has just reported first quarter earnings which show Switzerland's second-largest bank beating expectations, helped by a strong performance across the board. The bank simultaneously announced its intention to pursue a 4 billion swiss franc ($4 billion) capital raise. It's been "a good quarter, the best quarter in a while," Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Tidjane Thiam told CNBC on Wednesday from the group's Swiss headquarters. "The very deep, hard restructuring that we talked so much about in 2016 is finally producing some results with 10 percent return on capital which was our 2018 target for global markets which many people thought unachievable," he stated. On Wednesday the bank announced it would seek to pursue a fully underwritten rights offering with anticipated net proceeds of around 4 billion swiss fancs (CHF) and would not seek to divest any of its divisions, shelving any talk of an initial public offering (IPO) of the Swiss business. The investment bank said that it expects the intended capital increase to lead to a pro forma look-through CET1 ratio -- a measure of its ability to support risk -- of around 13.4 percent.

Thiam noted that the significant improvement in operations in combination with improved financial certainty due to settling with the U.S. Department of Justice last January over allegations of its mis-selling of residential mortgage-backed securities between 2005 and 2007, now allowed the bank to opt for a capital raise instead of a partial IPO, to fill a CHF 2 – 4 billion funding gap initially identified in 2015. "We always knew that the IPO has downsides - that it is quite dilutive - and that it wasn't ideal. But at the time it was a good way to deal with the CHF 2 – 4 billion gap which we couldn't fill because we couldn't at that time have done a CHF 10-11 billion rights issue," said the CEO from the company's Swiss headquarters. Thiam emphasized the consistency in Credit Suisse's plans, noting that the bank had declared an intention to raise CHF 9 – 11 billion of capital two years' ago and that now having raised CHF 6 billion already and having generated a further CHF 1 billion through internal measures, the options on the table to secure the remaining funding were an IPO and a capital raise. While the measure would be unlikely to eliminate all chatter over the strength of the bank's funding position, "it removes uncertainty for the foreseeable future and for all reasonable scenarios," declared Thiam.

David Levenson | Bloomberg | Getty Images