The chief executive of UBS India has said the global cutbacks to the global firm’s investment banking operations will not affect operations in India.

The chief executive of UBS India has said the global cutbacks to the global firm’s investment banking operations will not affect operations in India, according to a newspaper interview.  

Aashish Kamat is country head for a Swiss bank looking to expand into the BRIC region and broaden its market reach in the crucial wealth management space. Meanwhile, as announced this week, UBS Wealth Management relocated Oscar Balcon from Singapore to take up the role of chief executive for India. Balcon, a 28-year veteran of the Swiss banking giant, is to spearhead the development of a domestic wealth management business in the Indian subcontinent.

While the wealth arm of the Swiss bank appears to be on an upward curve in all its major regions, the firm intends to sharply retrench its investment banking operations, especially in the fixed income side. A few days ago, UBS announced that up to 10,000 jobs will be axed.

Inevitably, such a change prompts queries about how other parts of the firm might be affected.

"This [restructuring] is part of our strategy to free capital from risk-weighted assets, very little of which we have here," Kamat was quoted by the Economic Times [of India] as saying.

“None of this will impact the India business in a material manner. I mean we're not closing our fixed income business. What is being done globally is part of the investor strategy that was laid out last year. Tougher regulations post the 2008 crisis have made capital really punitive, and we want to free most of our risk-weighted capital, which means we would look to come out of the long-dated fixed income play,” he said.

Kamat continued: “Globally, we are reversing capital deployment between investment banking and private wealth management. Currently, our capital in play is roughly $40 billion, with about 65 per cent in investment banking and 35 per cent in private wealth.”

He went on to point out that 80 per cent of its pre-tax revenue comes from private wealth and 20 per cent from investment banking; the firm intends to reverse the capital ratio in favour of private wealth in the next three years.

At the end of last month UBS reported that its global and Americas wealth management arms both logged increased profits in the third quarter of this year.