Oswald Grubel

Oswald J. Grübel
Born	1943-11-23November 23, 1943 (age 82) Ilmenau, Germany
Nationality	German
Education	Banking apprenticeship, Deutsche Bank (Mannheim and Frankfurt)
Occupation	Banker
Company	UBS AG; Credit Suisse
Title	Former Group Chief Executive Officer, UBS AG; Former Chief Executive Officer, Credit Suisse
Net worth	CHF 175 million (2025)

Oswald Jürgen Grübel (born 23 November 1943) is a German banker who led two of Switzerland's largest banks in succession. He was chief executive officer of Credit Suisse from 2003 to 2007, and group chief executive officer of UBS from 2009 to 2011. A Swiss magazine that interviewed him in 2015 noted that no one else, Swiss or foreign, has led both of the country's top-tier banks as group chief executive.

Grübel spent nearly four decades at Credit Suisse and its predecessor businesses, rising from a trading desk at the London-based securities house White Weld to the bank's Group Executive Board and, from January 2003, to co-chief executive and then sole chief executive of Credit Suisse Group. He retired from Credit Suisse in May 2007 after announcing a record annual profit. Less than two years later, UBS's board brought him out of retirement to replace Marcel Rohner as group chief executive, charging him with restoring a bank that had just reported the largest annual loss in Swiss corporate history after the 2008 financial crisis.

Grübel's time at UBS ended on 24 September 2011, when he resigned after assuming responsibility for USD 2.3 billion (CHF 1.8 billion) in trading losses that UBS's investment bank in London had concealed through unauthorised transactions carried out by trader Kweku Adoboli. Regulators in Switzerland and the United Kingdom subsequently found serious failings in the bank's own risk controls rather than any wrongdoing by Grübel personally, and he was succeeded on an interim basis by Sergio Ermotti.

Since leaving UBS, Grübel has written a newspaper column, sat on the board of a Spanish golf resort, and continued to speak publicly on Swiss bank regulation and the financial sector. As of 2026, aged 82, he remains a regular commentator in the Swiss press on bank capital rules and the future of UBS, and still commutes daily to an office in Zurich.

Early life and education

Oswald Jürgen Grübel was born on 23 November 1943 in Ilmenau, in what a 2015 profile described as almost the exact geographic centre of Germany. His mother died about six months after his birth, and his father was killed on the Western Front not long afterwards, so Grübel was raised by his grandparents. He has said he wanted to become an engineer, recalling that he was good at both mathematics and technical drawing, but his grandfather insisted he take up a banking apprenticeship instead, telling him there would always be money to be made where there was money. Grübel did not attend university. From 1961 he trained as a bank clerk (Bankkaufmann) at Deutsche Bank in Mannheim and Frankfurt, starting on a monthly apprentice's wage of 130 Deutsche marks, and was assigned early on to the foreign department, where he corresponded with shipowners, bankers and other businessmen around the world on matters including ship financing.

Career

White Weld and the Credit Suisse group, 1970 to 1991

In 1970, Grübel left Deutsche Bank for White Weld Securities, a bond-trading house in Zurich and London that was part of what would become the Credit Suisse group. He later said he moved because Swiss banks paid roughly three times what he could earn in Germany, and because Zurich's banks were more dynamic than London's, which he recalled as having little genuinely international business beyond gold arbitrage between Johannesburg and New York. Grübel became chief executive of White Weld's London operation in 1978. His career subsequently took him through management roles in Singapore and Hong Kong, and he went on to join the Group Executive Board of Financière Credit Suisse First Boston in Zug, while simultaneously chairing Credit Suisse First Boston Futures Trading in Zurich and Credit Suisse First Boston Asia in Singapore.

Credit Suisse Group Executive Board, 1991 to 2002

Grübel became a member of Credit Suisse's Executive Board in 1991, with responsibility for equities, fixed income, global foreign exchange, money markets and asset and liability management. From 1997 he additionally took on responsibility for the group's trading activities as a member of the Credit Suisse First Boston Executive Board. Between 1998 and 2001 he was chief executive of Credit Suisse Private Banking.

Credit Suisse Financial Services and co-chief executive, 2002 to 2004

In December 2002, Credit Suisse's then chief executive and chairman, Lukas Mühlemann, left the bank under pressure over risky business decisions, reportedly with a severance package worth around CHF 20 million; Walter Kielholz, who already sat on the board and ran the group's Swiss Re reinsurance arm, became chairman. Grübel, then 59, and John J. Mack, then 58, were named co-chief executive officers of Credit Suisse Group effective from the start of 2003, acting as turnaround managers for the group; Grübel took responsibility for retail banking, private banking and the Winterthur insurance business, while Mack ran the investment bank, Credit Suisse First Boston. Grübel had become chief executive of the newly formed Credit Suisse Financial Services division in July 2002, a role he continued to hold alongside the co-chief executive post.

Sole chief executive of Credit Suisse, 2004 to 2007

In June 2004, Credit Suisse announced that Mack had agreed with the board not to renew his contract, which was due to expire on 12 July that year, and that discussions about a merger with another bank were no longer under consideration; Grübel became sole chief executive of the group effective 13 July 2004. As sole chief executive, Grübel oversaw a sustained recovery in profitability: Credit Suisse Group's net income rose from CHF 5,628 million in 2004 to CHF 5,850 million in 2005 and then to a record CHF 11,327 million in 2006, an increase of 94 per cent, helped by a CHF 1,817 million after-tax gain on the sale of the Winterthur insurance business to AXA. The Winterthur sale, completed in 2006, also cut the group's workforce sharply, from the low 60,000s in full-time equivalents in the preceding years to 44,871 by the end of 2006.

In February 2007, alongside the announcement of that record 2006 profit, Grübel said he would step down as chief executive effective 4 May 2007; Brady W. Dougan, until then head of Credit Suisse's investment bank, succeeded him. Credit Suisse's own filings record Grübel's departure from the firm as effective 5 May 2007, following what the company called a successful 38-year career at Credit Suisse and its predecessor businesses. Credit Suisse subsequently engaged him for one year as a senior adviser to the chairman of the board, for a flat fee of CHF 150,000, during which he reimbursed the bank CHF 75,000 for office and secretarial support.

UBS Group chief executive, 2009 to 2011

Following his retirement from Credit Suisse, Grübel worked independently as a wealth manager. On 26 February 2009, UBS's board of directors appointed him group chief executive effective immediately, replacing Marcel Rohner, who had told the board in early January that he intended to step down. The bank's own announcement described Grübel's extensive banking experience as valuable in what it called a challenging environment, and later filings noted that commitments had been made at his hiring in December 2008. The lender had reported a net loss attributable to shareholders of CHF 21.3 billion for 2008, the year before Grübel's arrival, after losses on residual risk positions in its investment bank during the financial crisis. On taking the role, Grübel voluntarily waived the deferred compensation awards he was still owed by Credit Suisse to avoid any possible conflict of interest; his new employer's compensation committee granted him replacement awards of similar value, including stock options over 4,000,000 shares at a strike price of CHF 10.10, exercisable from 26 February 2009.

By the end of 2009, the net loss attributable to shareholders had narrowed to CHF 2.7 billion, including a fourth-quarter net profit of CHF 1.2 billion, which the bank attributed to a reduction in residual risk positions and lower operating expenses; full-time equivalent staff numbers fell over the year from 77,783 to 65,233 as it continued to shrink. At UBS's Investor Day on 17 November 2009, Grübel set out medium-term objectives, telling investors that UBS was "building a new UBS" and committing it to a target of approximately CHF 15 billion in annual pre-tax profit, a cost-to-income ratio of 65 to 70 per cent and a return on equity of 15 to 20 per cent within three to five years. Full-year net profit of CHF 7.5 billion followed in 2010, and Grübel again declined any incentive award, drawing a base salary reported as CHF 3.0 million for the year.

By the first quarter of 2011, net profit was CHF 1.8 billion, down 18 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier, alongside net new money inflows of CHF 22 billion; Grübel told the market the bank would not issue full-year profit guidance, prompting one Swiss financial publication to describe the previously stated CHF 15 billion profit goal as "remaining a mirage".

Resignation, September 2011

In mid-September 2011, UBS discovered that Kweku Adoboli, a trader on the exchange-traded funds desk of its Global Synthetic Equities business in London, had built up unauthorised trading positions that were concealed using fictitious and mismatched internal bookings over an extended period; the losses eventually totalled USD 2.3 billion (CHF 1.8 billion). Adoboli was arrested on 14 September 2011 and later convicted of fraud by abuse of position, for which he was sentenced to seven years in prison. On 24 September 2011, nine days after Adoboli's arrest, the bank's board announced that it had accepted Grübel's resignation as group chief executive. Its own annual report recorded gratitude for what it called Grübel's outstanding contribution to the firm, and chairman Kaspar Villiger, who had called Grübel's original hiring "a stroke of luck for UBS", said the board deeply regretted his decision and credited Grübel with an impressive turnaround of the bank; Villiger added that Grübel considered it his duty to take responsibility for the incident. Sergio Ermotti, a regional UBS executive who had joined the bank from UniCredit earlier in 2011, was named interim group chief executive the same day and was confirmed in the role on 15 November 2011.

Reflecting on the resignation in a 2015 interview, Grübel said he had never regretted the decision, observing that such a step is easier to take near the end of a career, when time starts to matter more than money. He elected not to be considered for any bonus for 2011 and received no severance payment, continuing to receive his salary for six months after his departure.

Later activities and public commentary, 2012 to 2026

From May 2012, Grübel wrote a column answering readers' questions in the Swiss newspaper Der Sonntag, later Schweiz am Sonntag. He has continued to give interviews and public talks on banking and the Swiss financial centre. In an October 2025 YouTube interview with Dietmar Peetz of the investment house Real Unit, viewed roughly 50,000 times, Grübel said he regarded UBS's 2023 takeover of Credit Suisse as a mistake for the Swiss financial centre, arguing the Swiss National Bank should instead have bought Credit Suisse itself, nursed it back to health over perhaps five or ten years using the central bank's standing to attract good managers, and then returned it to the market at a profit. He also warned that credit creation had shifted since the global financial crisis away from banks toward lightly reserved non-bank lenders, a trend he said could become a problem if that lending boom ended; criticised high German income taxes as a barrier to attracting skilled workers; argued that any state can borrow heavily in its own currency, citing the yen's long decline as a caution about high public debt and an ageing electorate; and was sceptical that stablecoins offered a way out of currency debasement, since a dollar-pegged stablecoin would simply depreciate along with the dollar. He dismissed fears that Russia posed an imminent military threat to Germany as nonsense, and described Western plans to confiscate frozen Russian central bank assets as a breach of trust that he said helped explain the rise in the gold price. In August 2026, he publicly backed Swiss finance minister Karin Keller-Sutter in her dispute with UBS over proposals to require around CHF 20 billion in additional capital, arguing that the state, as the ultimate provider of liquidity in a crisis, was entitled to set the rules for the banks it might have to rescue, and that a bank could not reasonably criticise the state both for insufficient oversight and for tightening the rules in response; he accepted that the extra capital would reduce the bank's return on capital but said this would not weaken the Swiss financial centre as a whole. He was also critical of Credit Suisse's own earlier management, saying it was baffling that the bank had managed, in good economic times, to "liquidate itself".

Leadership and management style

Grübel has described himself as "a banker, not a Bankier", drawing a distinction between a salaried bank executive, which he said he had been his entire working life, and an owner of a bank. He was characterised in a 2015 profile as direct, blunt and often brusque, lacking the emollient manners more typical of Swiss executives, and he joked that he was typically made chief executive only once no Swiss candidate wanted the job any longer. Credit Suisse's own account of his 2002 to 2003 appointment described him and co-chief executive John Mack as having been brought in specifically as turnaround managers (Sanierer) after the bank's previous leadership had fallen into crisis.

Grübel repeatedly declined bonuses he was contractually entitled to when he judged the firm's performance did not merit them: he turned down an incentive award for 2009, his first full year back as a chief executive, and again waived any bonus for 2011, the year of his resignation. He also voluntarily forfeited deferred pay still owed to him by Credit Suisse when he joined UBS, to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. On taking personal responsibility for the Adoboli losses despite having had no direct involvement in the unauthorised trading, Grübel told an interviewer it had seemed self-evident to him, as the person in charge, that he should bear the consequences, a stance he said was by then regarded in parts of the industry as almost old-fashioned. He has also argued publicly that risk-taking is intrinsic to banking and economic growth, remarking that without risk there would be no economic growth at all.

Grübel was also willing to defend the industry in blunt terms. He argued in 2015 that governments would always rescue failing banks rather than let them collapse, giving as his reason, with a dry laugh, that a great many voters hold bank accounts. Asked about the sector's declining public reputation, he argued that the damage had begun not with the 2008 financial crisis but some fifteen to twenty years earlier, when new rules first required banks to publish individual executives' pay; in his view the public reaction was less about the size of the sums involved than simple surprise that any individual could earn so much in a single year, a reaction he said banks made worse by overstating how irreplaceable their top earners actually were. He also contrasted the slower pace of banking earlier in his career with the business he left behind, recalling that a trading position which once could be unwound over three or four weeks might by 2015 need to be exited in three or four seconds, a change he welcomed in principle while acknowledging it could overwhelm some market participants and was open to abuse by others.

Major deals and strategic decisions

The most significant corporate transaction of Grübel's tenure at Credit Suisse was the 2006 sale of the group's Winterthur insurance business to AXA, which produced an after-tax gain of CHF 1,817 million and was a central element of the record profit Credit Suisse reported for 2006. Earlier, as part of the management reshuffle that made him co-chief executive in 2003, Credit Suisse said discussions about a merger with another major bank, reportedly floated by his co-chief executive John Mack, were no longer under consideration once Mack left the firm in 2004.

At UBS, Grübel's principal strategic act was the medium-term plan he unveiled at the bank's Investor Day in November 2009, which committed the group to specific five-year financial targets, including the CHF 15 billion pre-tax profit goal, as the central benchmark against which his recovery strategy would be judged. That target had still not been met by the time of Grübel's resignation in September 2011, by which point the bank had scaled back its ambitions for the following years. In the aftermath of the Adoboli affair, the board, under chairman Villiger, announced that the roughly 18,000-person investment bank would be restructured to take fewer risks, use less capital and play a smaller role within the group relative to wealth management, a decision taken as Grübel's successor was being installed rather than one Grübel himself implemented.

Financial and market performance

Credit Suisse Group reported a net loss of CHF 4,448 million in 2002, the year its previous leadership was ousted, with return on equity of negative 11.4 per cent. Under Grübel, first as co-chief executive and then as sole chief executive, the group returned to a modest net income of CHF 770 million in 2003, its first full year under the new leadership, before net income rose to CHF 5,628 million in 2004, CHF 5,850 million in 2005 and a record CHF 11,327 million in 2006, with return on equity recovering to 27.5 per cent that year. The group's workforce fell sharply in 2006, largely because of the Winterthur divestment, to 44,871 full-time equivalents, down from 78,457 in 2002 and a range of roughly 60,000 to 63,500 in the intervening years. The board's proposed ordinary dividend and capital repayment also rose over the period, from CHF 0.10 per share for 2002 to CHF 2.70 per share proposed for 2006.

At UBS, net losses attributable to shareholders narrowed from CHF 21.3 billion in 2008, the year before Grübel took over, to CHF 2.7 billion in 2009, before a return to profit under Grübel, with net income of CHF 7.5 billion in 2010 and CHF 4.2 billion in 2011, a year in which results were reduced by the CHF 1.8 billion Adoboli trading loss and by difficult markets linked to the eurozone sovereign debt crisis. Market capitalisation stood at CHF 57.1 billion at the end of 2009, CHF 58.8 billion at the end of 2010 and CHF 42.8 billion at the end of 2011. Full-time equivalent staff numbers were roughly stable during Grübel's tenure, moving from 65,233 at the end of 2009 to 64,617 at the end of 2010 and 64,820 at the end of 2011, after the much sharper reductions of the preceding crisis years. For 2011, a first post-crisis dividend to shareholders was proposed, of CHF 0.10 per share, alongside diluted earnings per share of CHF 1.08 and an improved Basel II tier 1 capital ratio of 19.6 per cent, up from 17.8 per cent the year before.

Board memberships and outside roles

During his time as UBS chief executive, Grübel held a number of outside roles, serving as a board member of the Spanish residential and golf estate La Zagaleta, the Swiss American Chamber of Commerce, the Institute of International Finance and the Financial Services Forum, and as a member of the Shanghai International Financial Advisory Council, the Institut International d'Etudes Bancaires and the International Monetary Conference. By contrast, Credit Suisse's own 2003 and 2004 filings had noted that Grübel held no significant board memberships outside the Credit Suisse group at that time.

Grübel's involvement with La Zagaleta continued long after he left UBS: he kept a second home at the exclusive gated resort near Marbella, visiting at least once a month, and served for a time as president of its owners' association, a role also held at times by the late former Credit Suisse chairman Rainer E. Gut, who owned a property there as well. After the Abu Dhabi investment group Modon Holding acquired the entire resort at the end of 2024, on confidential terms, Grübel continued to serve only as chairman of the owners' community.

Controversies

The defining controversy of Grübel's career was the unauthorised trading scandal uncovered at UBS's investment bank in September 2011. The bank discovered that Kweku Adoboli, a director-level trader on the exchange-traded funds desk of its Global Synthetic Equities business in London, had for an extended period concealed unauthorised trading positions using one-sided internal futures positions, delayed trade bookings and fictitious deals with no real counterparty, producing losses of USD 2.3 billion. Adoboli was arrested on 14 September 2011 and, in November 2012, was convicted on two counts of fraud by abuse of position (he was acquitted of related false accounting charges) and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.

Regulatory findings on the episode focused on the bank's systems and controls rather than on any individual at chief executive level. Britain's Financial Services Authority fined UBS AG £29.7 million in November 2012 for breaching its Principles on organisation, risk management and due skill, care and diligence, concluding that insufficient focus on unauthorised-trading risk within the London business had allowed significant control breakdowns to go undetected; the FSA noted as a mitigating factor the conduct of the firm and its senior management in promptly reporting the matter to regulators and police and cooperating fully with the investigation. The regulator's independent investigation also found that Adoboli had engaged in unauthorised trading and used concealment mechanisms as far back as December 2008, well before the period covered by the fine, though at far lower volumes and with much smaller profits and losses than in 2011. UBS separately clawed back bonuses and withheld 50 per cent of deferred compensation from employees implicated in the affair, totalling more than £34 million. Switzerland's FINMA, which investigated jointly with the FSA, concluded separately that serious deficiencies in risk management and controls at UBS's investment bank meant the fraudulent trading would probably have been detected sooner had those deficiencies not existed, and it imposed capital restrictions and an acquisition ban on the investment bank while appointing an independent monitor. Neither regulator's published findings attributed Adoboli's conduct, or the control failures that allowed it, to Grübel personally; UBS's own filings instead describe him as the Group Chief Executive Officer who "assumed full responsibility for the matter" and resigned as a consequence, declining any bonus for the year.

Personal life

Grübel has lived and worked in Switzerland since joining Credit Suisse's predecessor business in 1970 but has never taken Swiss citizenship, saying in a 2015 interview that a different passport would not make him a different person and that he had never felt the need to be naturalised, even as he habitually spoke of "we Swiss" in conversation. He said he had always felt comfortable in Switzerland because of its standard of living and natural environment, adding that he preferred not to live in large cities. As of 2025, financial-wealth rankings listed his residence as being in the canton of Schwyz. He has kept a daily office at Zurich's Schanzengraben, in the heart of the city's financial district, into his eighties, saying the appeal of going to work lies in staying engaged with world events, meeting people and keeping mentally sharp enough to make informed investment decisions.

Grübel has also kept a second home at the La Zagaleta resort near Marbella in Spain since his banking career, visiting for a few days most months. He has recalled meeting Donald Trump in the 1980s while working as an investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston, an encounter he said left him determined never to meet Trump again; he described Trump's self-image as a property magnate, his large ego and blunt manner of speaking as a culture shock for a European at the time, adding that his opinion of Trump's conduct had changed little since, although he credited Trump with a strong grasp of economic affairs.

See also

• Credit Suisse
• UBS
• Kweku Adoboli
• Sergio Ermotti
• Brady Dougan
• Marcel Rohner
• John J. Mack

External links

• UBS AG filings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
• Credit Suisse Group filings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
• FCA Final Notice to UBS AG, 25 November 2012
• FINMA press release on UBS trading losses, 26 November 2012