Strategy
UBS Begins Job Cuts Amid Planned Restructuring

The job cuts will affect as many as 700 people in Switzerland, affecting divisions including wealth management.
UBS has begun a round of
job cuts across divisions including wealth management as part of
a restructuring plan designed to erase $1.0 billion in costs over
the next three years, Bloomberg reported earlier this
week.
The reductions are taking place in the investment bank, wealth
management unit and Swiss business, ranging from managing
director to junior employees, the news service reported, citing
unnamed sources.
The Zurich-listed bank declined to comment on the story when
contacted by this publication, other than to reiterate the point
it made last month that its restructuring amounts to cost
reductions of around $300 million and that it is broad-based
across the group and across geographies.
The newswire said that over the next three years, as many as 700
positions are expected to be axed in Switzerland alone, covering
the bulk at the corporate cost centre and about 200 positions
between wealth management and the bank’s Swiss unit for personal
and corporate banking. This is in addition to about 125 cuts
still to come from a previous wealth restructuring exercise.
Ralph Hamers, CEO, who is in his first year in the role, is
pushing to increase digitising UBS’s operations. As part of that
move, at the start of May, the bank appointed Mike Darganas as
chief digital and information officer.
Another change that was announced in the Q1 results, starting
with the Q1 figures, was that UBS would be introducing net new
fee-generating assets as a new performance measure for the global
wealth management arm. This measure is designed to capture growth
in clients’ invested assets from net flows related to mandates,
investment funds with recurring fees, hedge funds and private
markets investments, combined with dividend and interest payments
into mandates, less fees paid to UBS by clients.
Compared with net new money, net new fee-generating assets
exclude flows related to assets that primarily generate revenues
when traded in the form of commissions and transaction spreads,
or borrowed against in the form of net interest income; they also
exclude deposit flows that generate net interest income, and
custody positions that generate custody fees.