2023-08-31 08:57:17
Five and a half months following the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse, Sergio Ermotti, CEO of UBS, assures us: the decision, announced on Thursday August 31, to fully integrate the retail banking network of his great rival in the Confederation is “the best solution for UBS, stakeholders and the Swiss economy”.
The Credit Suisse brand, created in 1856 and which employed 16,700 people in the country, might therefore disappear from the Swiss retail banking market by the end of 2025, the time to complete the legal formalities, then to to migrate clients to UBS systems. With, the key, job cuts that the group figures for the moment at 3,000: a thousand directly linked to the integration of the network, 2,000 others to the restructuring of the group as a whole. At the end of June, the group employed just under 120,000 people worldwide, including 45,286 for the former Credit Suisse, around 5,000 less than at the end of 2022.
The other six scenarios studied in recent months, which included an IPO of Credit Suisse’s network banking activities, their complete spin-off and outright sale, would also have led to staff reductions, explained Sergio Ermotti.
Outstanding financial results for UBS
The managing director, recalled urgently in March at the head of the group which he had left in 2020, therefore decided without waiting for the opinion of the “Comco”, the Swiss Competition Commission. “Competition on the Swiss market remains strong in all of our activities”, he explained Thursday, specifying that the network of UBS would be, following the resumption of that of Credit Suisse, only the third of the country.
This integration is only one part of the planned group-wide restructuring: UBS has set itself the objective of achieving more than 10 billion dollars (9.18 billion euros) in savings by the end of the end of 2026, in particular by selling activities deemed non-strategic, in investment banking among others. UBS intends to focus on wealth management and asset management, areas that have made it successful in recent years.
This expertise made it possible, in the second quarter of 2023, to reverse the trend of the flight of deposits from Credit Suisse customers, a movement whose acceleration had led to its emergency rescue in mid-March.
The current quarter from April to June is mainly reflected in exceptional financial results: UBS posted a net profit of 28.9 billion dollars for the period. This world record for the sector is explained above all by the purely accounting impact of the acquisition of Credit Suisse completed on June 12: the 3 billion Swiss francs (3.13 billion euros) disbursed did not in fact represent only a small part of the real value of the assets taken over, which led to a very strong revaluation in the accounts.
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