, intends to extend the offering to Credit Suisse's international clients later this year.
MyWay’s client assets reached $10 billion earlier in 2024, and now stand at $12 billion, this news service understands. A total of 8,000 clients use the channel, about which this publication wrote here.
The platform is designed for investors who want to determine how to achieve their goals and set the direction individually while delegating the day-to-day management to experts. Clients can invest in a portfolio designed from more than 80 building blocks.
A display of the MyWay front end
“We are delighted to expand our market-leading offering that has been a great success at UBS to our clients on the CS platform,” Bruno Marxer, head CIO Global Investment Management, said. “We continue to see strong traction among clients on UBS MyWay, with more than 200 new portfolios opened globally on average each month since the beginning of the year.”
The service allows clients – those with at least $500,000 – to become involved in constructing their own asset allocations, leaving the role of picking stocks, bonds and other individual assets to the bank. This goes a step beyond a conventional discretionary model because the client, not the firm, directs the asset allocation that best fits with his or her personal views and preferences (in line with their overall risk tolerance and objectives).
This “build-your-own” asset allocation framework has in the past been more the preserve of clients with tens of millions of dollars in assets, not those lower down the HNW or even mass-affluent scale. (This publication wrote about the challenges of serving mass-affluent clients here.)
In May last year, UBS expanded its offering to clients across the UK and Jersey; it is already available in Singapore, and operated in Switzerland in 2020. It is also available in Hong Kong, Germany, Italy and Japan.
Affluent clients and robots
UBS has made several forays into tech-driven banking and finance. For example, in the US, UBS bought $69.7 million note convertible into Wealthfront shares, giving it exposure to this robo-advisor business model. It had initially contemplated buying Wealthfront in an all-cash deal. UBS said this deal enabled it to accelerate growth in the US and widen its appeal to affluent investors. At present, UBS’s wealth management business is largely focused on high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals.
The Wealthfront deal was ironic because in 2018 UBS sold its SmartWealth business to US-based online investment advisor SigFig. At the time it appeared that the bank had pulled out of moving into such a channel.