Credit Suisse Profit Falls 96% in First Quarter LONDON - Credit Suisse said on Wednesday that profit fell 96 percent in the first quarter, as the big Swiss bank continued to contend with the dual headwinds of a new regulatory environment and an economic slump. Profit in the first three months of the year fell to 44 million Swiss francs ($48 million) from 1.1 billion francs in the first quarter of 2011, driven by a charge on the value on its own debt and a pullback in its investment banking business. Net revenue dropped to 5.9 billion francs from 7.8 billion francs. Despite the weakness, the bank exceeded analysts" estimates. It also showed a marked improvement from the previous quarter, when it reported a loss of 637 million Swiss francs. "We had a good start to 2012," Brady W. Dougan, the chief executive, said in a statement. We began to see the effects from the measures we announced in mid-2011 to evolve our business model and cost structure and we benefited from an improved market environment. Like many European financial firms, Credit Suisse is scrambling to remake its business in light of new rules and changing market conditions. In recent months, it has been shrinking its investment banking operation and cutting 3,500 jobs across the bank to reduce costs. The bank has also been scaling back and exiting risky businesses. Credit Suisse said its risk-weighted assets dropped by more than a third. "Investing in our client franchise while at the same time reducing risks and tightly managing costs has been a priority for us," Mr. Dougan said. While Credit Suisse has made progress on its turnaround effort, the firm is still struggling, with investment banking at the center of its problems. Even though the firm showed improvements in some areas like fixed-income sales and trading, pretax profit at the investment banking unit fell to 993 million francs in the first quarter from 1.5 billion francs in the period a year earlier. In the fourth quarter of 2011, the unit posted a pretax loss of 1.4 billion francs.