UBS

UBS Group AG
Type	Public
Traded as	SIX: UBSG NYSE: UBS Swiss Market Index component
Industry	Banking Financial services
Founded	1862 (Bank in Winterthur); present form 1998; Credit Suisse acquired 2023
Headquarters	Zurich and Basel, Switzerland
Key people	Sergio Ermotti (Group chief executive) Colm Kelleher (Chairman)
Products	Wealth management, investment banking, asset management, retail and corporate banking
Employees	Approximately 105,000
Website	ubs.com

UBS Group AG is a Swiss multinational bank with headquarters in Zurich and Basel. It is the largest private bank and wealth manager in the world, with invested assets measured in the trillions of dollars, and it is among the most systemically important financial institutions in existence.

The company's present form dates from the 1998 merger of the Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation, and its history runs through a very large number of Swiss banks reaching back to the Bank in Winterthur of 1862.

Its defining recent event was the acquisition of Credit Suisse on 19 March 2023, arranged over a weekend by the Swiss government, the Swiss National Bank and the financial regulator FINMA, after Credit Suisse suffered a loss of confidence that made its failure imminent. UBS paid approximately CHF 3 billion in shares, a fraction of its target's book value, with state guarantees against certain losses and liquidity support, and the shareholder votes that Swiss law would normally require were dispensed with by emergency ordinance.

The transaction created a bank whose balance sheet is approximately twice Swiss gross domestic product, which is a concentration without precedent in a developed economy and which has produced a sustained political argument in Switzerland about whether the country can afford to guarantee it.

UBS's business is principally wealth management: the administration and investment of assets for wealthy individuals and families, which requires little capital, produces fee income and is far more stable than investment banking. That focus was adopted after the 2008 crisis and after the succession of scandals described below, and it is the strategy the Credit Suisse acquisition reinforced.

History

Origins

Swiss banking developed in the nineteenth century around three activities: financing the country's industrialisation, particularly railways and textiles; trade finance, given Switzerland's position between markets; and the management of foreign wealth, assisted by political neutrality and by the banking secrecy that was codified in the Banking Act of 1934.

The Union Bank of Switzerland descended from the Bank in Winterthur, founded in 1862, and the Toggenburger Bank, founded in 1863, which merged in 1912.

The Swiss Bank Corporation descended from the Basler Bankverein of 1872 and subsequent combinations.

Both grew through the twentieth century by absorbing smaller Swiss banks, and both expanded internationally after the Second World War as Swiss neutrality, currency stability and banking secrecy made the country the principal destination for internationally mobile wealth.

Banking secrecy was codified in 1934, and the conventional Swiss account of its purpose, that it was enacted to protect German Jews' assets from Nazi confiscation, has been questioned by historians who find the evidence thin and who identify the more immediate motive as the protection of French depositors from their own tax authorities following a scandal in Paris.

The dormant accounts controversy of the 1990s concerned assets deposited by Holocaust victims that Swiss banks had retained, in some cases demanding death certificates that the depositors' heirs could not obtain. A class action and very substantial political pressure, principally from the United States, produced a settlement of US$1.25 billion in 1998 by the Swiss banks, of which UBS and the Swiss Bank Corporation were the principal parties, and the Volcker Committee's investigation established the general facts.

The 1998 merger and expansion

The Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation merged on 29 June 1998, the largest banking merger conducted to that date, forming UBS AG.

The merger was substantially a rescue: Union Bank had lost very large sums in derivatives and in its exposure to Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund whose collapse in 1998 required a Federal Reserve-organised rescue, and its management was correspondingly weakened.

The combined bank expanded aggressively in investment banking through the 2000s, acquiring PaineWebber in the United States in 2000 for approximately US$12 billion, which gave it a very large American brokerage network, and building a fixed income business whose growth was funded by the group's balance sheet and whose ambition exceeded its competence.

The 2008 crisis

UBS suffered proportionally greater losses in the financial crisis than any European bank, writing down more than US$50 billion, principally on American subprime mortgage securities that its fixed income division had accumulated.

The bank's own subsequent report to shareholders, an unusually candid document, identified the causes: a growth strategy that had rewarded revenue without regard to risk; a funding model in which the investment bank borrowed from the group at internal rates that did not reflect the risk it was taking; risk management that reported the sensitivity of positions without their absolute size; and a reliance on rating agency assessments in place of analysis.

The Swiss government injected CHF 6 billion in October 2008 and the Swiss National Bank took approximately US$60 billion of illiquid assets into a special purpose vehicle. Both were repaid at a profit to the state by 2013.

The tax and misconduct years, 2008 to 2015

The crisis was followed by a sequence of scandals that reshaped Swiss banking.

The American tax case. The Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service alleged that UBS had systematically assisted American citizens to conceal assets, with bankers travelling to the United States to solicit clients and advising them on concealment. UBS entered a deferred prosecution agreement in February 2009, paid US$780 million and disclosed account holders' names, and a subsequent agreement transferred approximately 4,450 further names.

The case ended Swiss banking secrecy as it had existed. Switzerland subsequently agreed to the automatic exchange of tax information, and the model of the anonymous Swiss account, which had defined the industry for seventy-five years, was eliminated within a decade.

The rogue trader. Kweku Adoboli, a trader in the bank's Delta One desk in London, lost approximately US$2.3 billion through unauthorised positions concealed by fictitious hedges, disclosed in September 2011. He was convicted of fraud and imprisoned. The chief executive Oswald Grübel resigned.

LIBOR. UBS paid approximately US$1.5 billion in December 2012 to American, British and Swiss authorities over the manipulation of the London Interbank Offered Rate, with its Japanese subsidiary pleading guilty to wire fraud. The internal communications disclosed, in which traders requested rate submissions in exchange for favours, were among the most damaging produced in the investigations across the industry.

Foreign exchange. UBS paid further penalties in 2015 over the manipulation of currency benchmarks, and the LIBOR non-prosecution agreement was terminated as a consequence, requiring a guilty plea.

France. A French court convicted UBS in 2019 of illegal solicitation and aggravated money laundering of tax fraud proceeds and imposed penalties of €4.5 billion, reduced on appeal to approximately €1.8 billion and then further, with proceedings continuing into the 2020s.

The wealth management strategy, 2011 to 2023

Sergio Ermotti became chief executive in November 2011 following Grübel's resignation and conducted the most significant strategic change in the bank's history.

His judgement was that UBS could not compete with the American investment banks, which had larger balance sheets, cheaper funding and a home market, and that its actual advantage was wealth management, in which it was already the largest in the world and which required little capital.

The 2012 restructuring accordingly announced the elimination of approximately 10,000 positions and the effective closure of the fixed income trading business, retaining only what was required to serve wealth management and corporate clients. The investment bank's risk-weighted assets were reduced by more than half.

The decision was contested at the time and was subsequently imitated across European banking, most explicitly by Deutsche Bank in 2019, and it is generally regarded as among the better strategic judgements made in the industry after the crisis.

UBS restructured into a holding company, UBS Group AG, in 2014, to satisfy resolution requirements, and returned to consistent profitability.

Ermotti left in 2020, succeeded by Ralph Hamers of ING, whose tenure was cut short by the Credit Suisse acquisition.

The Credit Suisse acquisition, 2023

Credit Suisse had been Switzerland's other large bank and UBS's rival for a century and a half, and it failed over approximately two years.

Its difficulties accumulated: the Greensill Capital supply chain funds, closed in March 2021 with several billion dollars of client money frozen; the Archegos Capital Management collapse the same month, which cost it approximately US$5.5 billion, more than any other prime broker; a spying scandal in which it had surveilled a departing executive, which cost the chief executive his position; a Mozambican loan scandal; a conviction in Switzerland for failing to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian cocaine network; a chairman who resigned in 2022 for breaching quarantine rules; and a succession of restructurings each announced as final.

In October 2022 a social media rumour about the bank's solvency produced outflows of approximately CHF 110 billion in a quarter, which is among the largest deposit runs recorded and which the bank survived.

The end came in March 2023. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank on 10 March produced general anxiety about banks; on 15 March the chairman of the Saudi National Bank, Credit Suisse's largest shareholder, stated in an interview that it would not provide further capital, which was a statement about its own regulatory limits and which was read as a refusal; the share price collapsed; and the Swiss National Bank's provision of CHF 50 billion of liquidity failed to stop the outflows.

Over the weekend of 18 and 19 March the Swiss authorities arranged the sale to UBS. The price was approximately CHF 3 billion in UBS shares, against a book value of approximately CHF 45 billion. The state provided a loss guarantee of CHF 9 billion above an initial CHF 5 billion borne by UBS, and the Swiss National Bank provided up to CHF 200 billion of liquidity.

Two features of the transaction were extraordinary.

The shareholder votes were dispensed with by emergency ordinance, so that neither bank's owners approved the sale of one and the purchase of the other.

The Additional Tier 1 bonds were written down to zero, approximately CHF 16 billion, while shareholders received something. This inverted the conventional order of loss absorption, in which equity is extinguished before debt, and it was permitted by the terms of the Swiss instruments. Bondholders sued in several jurisdictions and the Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled against FINMA in October 2025, finding that the write-down had lacked a legal basis, a decision the regulator appealed.

Integration, 2023 to 2026

Sergio Ermotti was recalled as chief executive in April 2023 to conduct the integration, an appointment the board justified on the ground that no one else had comparable experience of restructuring the bank.

The integration is among the largest ever attempted in banking and is expected to take until 2026 and beyond. It involves merging two Swiss banks whose systems, cultures and client bases overlap substantially, reducing headcount by tens of thousands, winding down the parts of Credit Suisse's investment bank that UBS does not want, and migrating several million client accounts.

The results have been better than expected. UBS recorded a very large accounting gain on the acquisition, reflecting the difference between the price and the fair value of the assets, returned to profit quickly, retained a higher proportion of Credit Suisse's wealth management clients than forecast, and completed the legal merger of the parent entities in 2024 and of the Swiss entities in 2025.

The political consequence has been more difficult. The Swiss government's capital proposals, published in 2024 and developed since, would require UBS to hold substantially more capital against its foreign subsidiaries, with figures discussed in the region of US$25 billion additional. UBS has opposed them forcefully, has raised the possibility of relocating its headquarters, and the argument has become the principal question in Swiss financial policy.

Recent developments include a US$511 million settlement with the American Department of Justice in May 2025 over Credit Suisse's assistance to Americans concealing more than US$4 billion offshore, including a guilty plea by Credit Suisse Services AG; the appointment of Beatriz Martin as chief operations officer in October 2025 with responsibility for the integration; the opening of a global capability centre in Hyderabad in February 2026; the leasing of office space in Dallas in January 2026 for a wealth advice centre; and a US$125 million penalty from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in 2026 over money laundering through an American subsidiary.

In April 2025 UBS Asset Management removed restrictions preventing some of its sustainability funds from investing in conventional weapons manufacturers, part of a wider European reassessment following the change in the continent's defence posture.

Ermotti's compensation of CHF 14.9 million for 2024, disclosed in March 2025, made him the highest-paid bank executive in Europe and occurred during a public argument about capping banker pay in Switzerland.

Business

UBS reports through five divisions.

Global Wealth Management

The largest and most important, managing assets for wealthy individuals and families worldwide, with invested assets in the trillions of dollars, which makes it the largest such business in existence by a substantial margin.

The business divides by client wealth. Ultra-high-net-worth clients, generally those with more than US$50 million, receive services resembling those of an investment bank: lending against portfolios, structuring, access to private markets and family office services. High-net-worth clients receive discretionary and advisory management. Affluent clients receive a more standardised service.

The economics are attractive. Revenue is a fee on assets, so it rises with markets and is stable relative to trading income; the capital required is small; and client relationships are extremely durable, since transferring a complex portfolio between institutions is difficult and since the relationship is frequently multi-generational.

The Americas business, built on PaineWebber and enlarged by Credit Suisse's, is the largest by revenue and the least profitable, because American wealth management is competitive and because the brokers are paid a share of what they generate. UBS has restructured it repeatedly.

Switzerland is the home market and the most profitable.

Asia Pacific, principally Hong Kong and Singapore, has been the fastest-growing region and is the one in which the Credit Suisse acquisition added most.

Personal and Corporate Banking

The Swiss domestic bank, providing retail accounts, mortgages, corporate lending and payments, and holding a very large share of the Swiss market, enlarged substantially by Credit Suisse's Swiss business.

The concentration that results, in which one institution holds a very large proportion of Swiss deposits, mortgages and corporate lending, is the principal domestic political objection to the acquisition, and the Swiss competition authority examined it and declined to intervene, a decision that has been criticised.

Asset Management

Manages approximately US$1.8 trillion for institutions and through funds, competing with BlackRock, Amundi and the American managers, and is subscale relative to them.

Investment Bank

Substantially reduced since 2012 and reduced further by the elimination of most of Credit Suisse's.

It provides advisory, equity and debt capital markets, equities trading, in which UBS has a strong global position, and foreign exchange and rates trading sized to support wealth management rather than to compete with the American banks.

The strategy is explicitly to be a bank that serves the wealth business rather than one that trades for its own account, and the risk-weighted assets allocated to it are capped as a proportion of the group.

Non-core and Legacy

The Credit Suisse assets UBS does not want, being wound down, principally structured products, emerging market exposures and the securitised products business sold to Apollo.

The Swiss question

The acquisition created a problem for Switzerland that has no obvious solution.

UBS's balance sheet is approximately CHF 1.6 trillion against Swiss gross domestic product of approximately CHF 800 billion, so the bank is roughly twice the economy. Its failure could not be absorbed by the state, which is the condition regulators have spent fifteen years attempting to eliminate and which Switzerland has now created in a more acute form than existed before.

The government's response has been to propose substantially higher capital requirements, particularly full capitalisation of foreign subsidiaries, which currently receive partial recognition. The figure discussed is in the region of US$25 billion of additional common equity.

UBS's response has been that the requirement would make it uncompetitive against American and Asian banks, that it did the country a service by taking Credit Suisse and is being penalised for it, and that it could relocate. The last is not an idle threat in the sense that the bank could plausibly move, and it is an unlikely one, since a Swiss bank without Switzerland is a different proposition and since no other jurisdiction would welcome a balance sheet of that size either.

The parliamentary inquiry into Credit Suisse's failure reported in December 2024, criticising FINMA's supervision, the bank's management and the regulatory framework, and recommending changes including stronger supervisory powers and a senior managers regime.

The unresolved question is what happens if UBS fails. Switzerland cannot recapitalise it; the resolution framework has never been tested at that scale; and the emergency ordinance used in March 2023 demonstrated that the authorities will act outside the framework when the framework is inconvenient, which is precisely what the framework was designed to prevent.

Corporate affairs

Sergio Ermotti has been group chief executive since April 2023 and previously from November 2011 to October 2020. An Italian-speaking Swiss from Ticino who began as an apprentice at a Lugano bank and worked at Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, he is the executive most associated with the modern strategy.

Colm Kelleher, formerly president of Morgan Stanley, has been chairman since April 2022 and negotiated the Credit Suisse acquisition.

Ralph Hamers, from ING, was chief executive from 2020 to 2023.

Beatriz Martin became chief operations officer in October 2025 with responsibility for the integration.

UBS employs approximately 105,000 people, reduced from approximately 120,000 at the completion of the acquisition, with further reductions planned, and operates in more than 50 countries.

Its headquarters are at Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich and at Aeschenvorstadt in Basel, the dual arrangement reflecting the 1998 merger of a Zurich bank and a Basel one.

Finances. The bank's revenue exceeds US$45 billion, its common equity tier one ratio is approximately 14 to 15 per cent, its invested assets exceed US$6 trillion, and it has resumed share buybacks following the acquisition.

Swiss banking

UBS cannot be understood without the system it belongs to, and Swiss banking has characteristics that no other country's has.

Why Switzerland

Neutrality. Switzerland has not been at war since 1815, which meant that money placed there was not subject to the confiscations, currency reforms and occupations that afflicted every neighbouring country during the twentieth century. This is the fundamental reason foreign wealth came, and it required no legislation.

Currency stability. The Swiss franc has been among the most stable currencies in the world for a century, and holding assets in it has been a hedge against the failures of other currencies.

Political stability. A federal system with direct democracy and a consensus government produces policy that changes slowly, which is what a person placing assets for a generation requires.

Secrecy. The Banking Act of 1934 made the disclosure of client information a criminal offence rather than merely a civil breach, which meant that a banker could not be compelled to disclose and could be prosecuted for doing so.

The professional class. Generations of private bankers, lawyers and fiduciaries, with the institutional knowledge of how to hold assets across jurisdictions and generations.

The end of secrecy

The system ended between 2008 and 2018 and the cause was principally American.

The UBS case of 2008 and 2009 established that the United States would prosecute a foreign bank and would obtain names. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010 required foreign banks to report American account holders or face a withholding tax on their American income, which no bank could accept. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Common Reporting Standard, adopted by Switzerland with effect from 2017 and 2018, requires the automatic exchange of account information between participating jurisdictions.

The consequence is that a Swiss account is now reported to the holder's tax authority automatically, and the anonymity that defined the industry for eighty years is gone.

What survived is more interesting than what did not. Swiss banking has grown since secrecy ended, because the other characteristics, stability, neutrality, currency, expertise and the concentration of related professional services, are genuine and are not available elsewhere. The industry's clients are now taxpaying and the business is larger than it was.

The Swiss banking structure

The large banks, of which UBS is now the only one.

The cantonal banks, 24 institutions owned by the cantons and in most cases carrying a state guarantee, which together hold a very large share of Swiss domestic deposits and mortgages and which are the principal competition to UBS domestically.

The Raiffeisen cooperative group, which is the third largest Swiss banking group.

The private banks, including Pictet, Lombard Odier, Julius Baer and a considerable number of smaller partnerships, several of which are unlimited liability partnerships in which the partners' personal assets stand behind the bank, an arrangement that produces conservatism.

The foreign banks operating from Switzerland to serve international clients.

Credit Suisse

The bank UBS absorbed had a history as long as its own and its failure is the most significant European banking collapse since 2008.

Origins

Schweizerische Kreditanstalt was founded in Zurich in 1856 by Alfred Escher, a politician and entrepreneur, principally to finance the Swiss railway network and the Gotthard tunnel.

Escher is among the most consequential figures in Swiss history, having driven the railway construction that unified the country economically, the founding of the federal polytechnic that became ETH Zurich, and the bank that financed both.

The bank grew through the twentieth century, acquired the American investment bank First Boston in stages between 1978 and 1990, and became one of the two Swiss giants.

The decline

Credit Suisse's failure took approximately two decades and accelerated after 2019.

The investment bank had never been reconciled with the Swiss business. First Boston's culture, compensation and risk appetite were American, and successive attempts to restrain it produced departures and reduced revenue without reducing the risk.

The scandals accumulated: a 2014 guilty plea and US$2.6 billion penalty in the United States over tax evasion assistance; the Mozambique tuna bonds, a fraudulent state financing that produced penalties in 2021; the spying scandal of 2019, in which the bank surveilled a departing executive and which cost the chief executive Tidjane Thiam his position; the Greensill supply chain funds, closed in March 2021 with approximately US$10 billion of client money frozen and much of it unrecovered; the Archegos collapse in March 2021, which cost approximately US$5.5 billion, more than any other bank, because Credit Suisse's risk systems had not aggregated the exposure and because it reduced its position more slowly than competitors; a Swiss criminal conviction in 2022 for failing to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian cocaine network, the first such conviction of a Swiss bank; and the resignation of the chairman António Horta-Osório in January 2022 after nine months for breaching pandemic quarantine rules.

The October 2022 run. A social media rumour about the bank's condition produced deposit outflows of approximately CHF 110 billion in the fourth quarter, approximately a third of the wealth management assets, which the bank survived and from which it never recovered, because the outflows continued at a lower rate and because the cost of funding rose.

The restructuring announced in October 2022, which would have spun out the investment bank under the First Boston name with backing from the Saudi investor Michael Klein, required capital that the bank raised at a valuation that gave the Saudi National Bank approximately 10 per cent.

The failure

The end took nine days.

9 and 10 March 2023. Silicon Valley Bank failed in the United States, producing general anxiety about banks with unrealised losses and concentrated depositors.

14 March. Credit Suisse's annual report disclosed material weaknesses in its financial reporting controls, and its auditor issued an adverse opinion on their effectiveness.

15 March. Ammar Al Khudairy, chairman of the Saudi National Bank, was asked in a television interview whether his bank would provide further capital and answered that it absolutely would not, for regulatory reasons: increasing its stake above 10 per cent would have triggered requirements it did not wish to accept. The statement was accurate and was read as a refusal to support, and the share price fell approximately 24 per cent.

15 and 16 March. The Swiss National Bank provided CHF 50 billion of liquidity, which did not restore confidence. Outflows reached approximately CHF 10 billion a day.

17 to 19 March. The Swiss authorities concluded that the bank would not open on Monday, examined the options, and rejected both a state takeover and a resolution under the framework built after 2008, on the ground that a resolution of a bank of that size had never been attempted and that the consequences were unpredictable. They instructed UBS to buy it.

UBS's initial offer was approximately CHF 1 billion; the final price was approximately CHF 3 billion in shares, with the loss guarantee and the liquidity support described above, and with the shareholder votes eliminated by emergency ordinance under the federal constitution's provision for urgent action.

The consequences

For bondholders, the write-down of approximately CHF 16 billion of Additional Tier 1 instruments while shareholders received value inverted the expected hierarchy. The instruments' Swiss terms permitted it in a viability event, which lawyers had noted and investors had generally not, and the European Central Bank and the Bank of England both issued statements the following day confirming that their own frameworks would not do this, in order to prevent contagion in their markets. The Swiss Federal Administrative Court ruled against FINMA in October 2025, finding the write-down lacked a proper legal basis.

For Switzerland, the loss of one of its two large banks and the creation of a single institution twice the size of the economy.

For the resolution framework, a demonstration that the arrangements built over fifteen years to avoid exactly this outcome were not used when the moment arrived, which regulators elsewhere have examined with discomfort.

Wealth management explained

UBS's principal business is poorly understood outside finance and deserves description.

What it is

Wealth management is the administration of a wealthy family's assets: investing them, lending against them, structuring their ownership across jurisdictions and generations, managing the tax consequences, and providing the services that follow, from art advisory to succession planning to philanthropy.

It is not principally investment. A family with US$200 million typically wishes its capital preserved rather than maximised, because the consequence of losing it is far worse than the benefit of doubling it, and the bank's role is closer to that of a trustee than of a fund manager.

Why it is a good business

Fees on assets. Revenue is a percentage of what is managed, typically between 0.5 and 1 per cent annually depending on the service, which is stable relative to trading income and which rises with markets.

Little capital. The bank does not own the assets, so they do not consume its balance sheet, which means the return on equity is high.

Durability. A wealthy family's affairs, once arranged, are extremely difficult to move. The structures, the loans, the custody arrangements and the relationships are built over years, the tax consequences of unwinding them can be substantial, and the relationship is frequently inherited.

Lending. Clients borrow against their portfolios, at low risk to the bank because the collateral is liquid and the loan-to-value is conservative, which produces interest income on top of the fees.

The competition

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America through Merrill are the largest American competitors, both having pursued the same strategy of favouring wealth management over trading.

JPMorgan Chase competes at the very top through its private bank.

The Swiss private banks, Pictet, Lombard Odier, Julius Baer and others, compete on service and on the absence of an investment bank whose interests might conflict with the client's.

The family offices that very wealthy families establish themselves are the ultimate competition, and the largest of them employ the people the banks would otherwise.

Asian and Middle Eastern banks compete increasingly in their own regions.

The criticism

The industry facilitates the cross-border holding of wealth, which has legitimate purposes, currency diversification, political risk management, succession planning across jurisdictions, and which has also been used to evade tax and to conceal the proceeds of corruption.

The end of secrecy removed the most egregious version, and the criticism that remains concerns the structures that are lawful, trusts, foundations, holding companies in favourable jurisdictions, whose effect is to reduce tax legally and whose proliferation has been the subject of the Panama and Pandora Papers and of a substantial policy literature.

UBS's position, common to the industry, is that it complies with the law in every jurisdiction and reports as required, which is accurate and which does not address the argument that the industry's product is the reduction of obligations that others cannot reduce.

Regulation

UBS is designated a global systemically important bank by the Financial Stability Board and sits in one of the higher buckets, which requires additional capital.

Swiss requirements exceed the Basel minimum and were tightened after 2008 under the arrangements known as the Swiss finish. The post-Credit Suisse proposals would tighten them substantially further, principally by requiring UBS to capitalise its foreign subsidiaries fully at the parent level rather than at the current partial recognition, which the government estimates at approximately CHF 22 to 26 billion of additional common equity.

The argument is straightforward on both sides. The government's position is that a bank twice the size of the economy cannot be rescued and must therefore be unable to fail. UBS's position is that the requirement would place it at a disadvantage to American competitors that face lower requirements, that capital held against a subsidiary cannot be deployed, and that the bank performed a service in taking Credit Suisse.

FINMA, the Swiss regulator, was criticised heavily by the parliamentary inquiry into Credit Suisse's failure for having identified the problems and having lacked the powers and the willingness to compel change. The proposed reforms include the power to fine, which FINMA does not have, and a senior managers regime assigning personal responsibility.

Resolution. UBS maintains a resolution plan and has issued the loss-absorbing debt required, and the Credit Suisse experience demonstrated that the authorities may choose not to use the framework, which reduces its deterrent value.

Global operations

UBS operates in more than 50 countries.

Switzerland is the home market and the domestic bank holds a very large share of deposits, mortgages and corporate lending, enlarged by Credit Suisse's.

The United States holds the largest wealth management business by revenue, principally through the former PaineWebber network and now Credit Suisse's, and an investment bank concentrated in equities and advisory.

The United Kingdom hosts the London investment banking and trading operations, at 5 Broadgate, and a wealth business.

Asia Pacific operates from Hong Kong and Singapore, is the fastest-growing region, and is where the Credit Suisse acquisition added most in assets and where the competition from local banks is increasing.

Europe includes Germany, where the bank has built a substantial wealth business, Italy, Ermotti's cultural home, France, where the litigation described above proceeded, and the Nordic and Benelux markets.

The Middle East has grown substantially, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi becoming significant booking centres as sovereign wealth and family capital in the region has grown.

India hosts a growing operations and technology presence, with the Hyderabad centre opened in February 2026 joining existing capability in Pune and Mumbai, and several thousand employees conduct technology and processing for the group.

Poland hosts a large operations centre at Kraków and Wrocław.

Technology and operations

Banking technology is the least visible and most expensive part of an integration of this kind.

UBS must migrate several million Credit Suisse client accounts, with their histories, their instructions, their collateral arrangements and their regulatory records, onto its own systems, in multiple jurisdictions with different requirements, without interrupting service. The Swiss client migration was conducted in tranches through 2025 and is the largest such exercise a Swiss institution has attempted.

The group operates major technology centres in Switzerland, Poland, India, Singapore and the United States, employs tens of thousands of technology staff, and has pursued the general banking programme of moving from mainframe systems to cloud infrastructure, in UBS's case principally with Microsoft Azure.

It has also invested in artificial intelligence applications, principally in client research, in advisor support and in compliance screening, and has published on the use of language models to produce research summaries and, in an unusual exercise, on the creation of a synthetic video analyst.

Sponsorship and public presence

UBS sponsors Art Basel, which it has supported since 1994 and which is the principal fair in the contemporary art market, a relationship that connects directly to its wealth management clients, a very large proportion of whom are art collectors and to whom the bank provides art advisory and art-secured lending.

It publishes the Global Wealth Report annually, which is the standard source on the distribution of household wealth worldwide and which is cited extensively in policy debate, frequently by people arguing positions the bank does not hold.

It sponsors golf, Formula One through a period, and a number of Swiss institutions including the Zurich Opera House and the Verbier Festival.

Its advertising has for many years emphasised the longevity of client relationships rather than products, which is the appropriate message for a business whose customers make decisions over decades.

Timeline

• 1856 Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, later Credit Suisse, is founded by Alfred Escher.
• 1862 The Bank in Winterthur, a UBS predecessor, is founded.
• 1872 The Basler Bankverein, a Swiss Bank Corporation predecessor, is founded.
• 1912 The Union Bank of Switzerland is formed.
• 1934 The Banking Act codifies banking secrecy.
• 1990s The dormant accounts controversy produces a US$1.25 billion settlement in 1998.
• 1998 Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation merge on 29 June to form UBS AG.
• 2000 PaineWebber is acquired for approximately US$12 billion.
• 2007 to 2009 Writedowns exceed US$50 billion; the Swiss state injects CHF 6 billion in October 2008.
• 2009 A US$780 million deferred prosecution agreement over American tax evasion assistance is entered in February.
• 2011 Kweku Adoboli's unauthorised trading loses approximately US$2.3 billion; Sergio Ermotti becomes chief executive in November.
• 2012 The investment bank is substantially withdrawn from fixed income; LIBOR penalties of approximately US$1.5 billion are paid in December.
• 2014 UBS Group AG is established as a holding company.
• 2019 A French court imposes penalties of €4.5 billion, reduced on appeal.
• 2020 Ralph Hamers becomes chief executive.
• 2021 Credit Suisse loses approximately US$5.5 billion on Archegos and closes the Greensill funds.
• 2022 Credit Suisse is convicted in Switzerland over money laundering; deposits of approximately CHF 110 billion leave in the fourth quarter; Colm Kelleher becomes UBS chairman in April.
• 2023 Credit Suisse fails between 9 and 19 March; UBS acquires it for approximately CHF 3 billion on 19 March; Ermotti returns as chief executive in April.
• 2024 The parent entities merge; the parliamentary inquiry reports in December; capital proposals are published.
• 2025 The Swiss entities merge; a US$511 million American settlement is paid in May over Credit Suisse's conduct; the Federal Administrative Court rules against FINMA on the bond write-down in October; Beatriz Martin becomes chief operations officer in October; Ermotti's CHF 14.9 million compensation is disclosed in March.
• 2026 A global capability centre opens in Hyderabad in February; a Dallas wealth advice centre is announced in January; a US$125 million FinCEN penalty is imposed.

Notable people

Alfred Escher (1819 to 1882) founded Credit Suisse, drove Swiss railway construction and the founding of ETH Zurich, and is among the most consequential figures in Swiss history.

Marcel Ospel led UBS through the 1998 merger and the subsequent expansion and resigned as chairman in 2008 following the crisis losses.

Oswald Grübel led Credit Suisse and then UBS from 2009, returning it to profit and resigning in 2011 after the Adoboli losses.

Sergio Ermotti is described above.

Colm Kelleher negotiated the Credit Suisse acquisition.

Bradley Birkenfeld, a UBS banker, disclosed the American tax evasion scheme to the authorities, served forty months in prison for his own part, and received an award of US$104 million under the Internal Revenue Service whistleblower programme, the largest paid to an individual, which is among the more remarkable outcomes in the history of financial enforcement.

Tidjane Thiam led Credit Suisse from 2015 to 2020 and resigned over the surveillance scandal.

Ulrich Körner was Credit Suisse's final chief executive and joined UBS's executive board.

Reception

Among clients UBS is regarded as the most capable wealth manager at scale, with the qualification that a very large institution provides a less personal service than a private partnership.

Among competitors the 2012 strategic decision is regarded as prescient and the Credit Suisse acquisition as the most favourable transaction any bank has been offered in living memory.

Among regulators the bank is the principal systemic concern in Switzerland and a significant one internationally, and the argument about its capital is the most consequential open question in Swiss financial policy.

In Switzerland the bank occupies an uncomfortable position: it is a national institution, a very large employer and taxpayer, a source of the country's international standing, and an entity whose failure the country could not survive. Polling since 2023 has found substantial public unease about the concentration, and the political parties have divided on the capital question along lines that do not follow the usual left and right.

Among critics of the financial system UBS is the largest participant in an industry whose function is the preservation and cross-border administration of large fortunes, and the criticism of the industry attaches to it in proportion.

Assessment of the record

UBS's history divides into three periods and the judgement differs in each.

Before 2008 the bank pursued growth in investment banking with a risk management that did not understand what it was doing, and it suffered proportionally greater losses than any European institution and required a state rescue. Its own post-mortem is among the more honest documents produced by any bank about the crisis.

Between 2011 and 2023 it executed a strategic change of unusual clarity, withdrawing from businesses in which it had no advantage and concentrating on one in which it was already first, and it did so before its competitors and against considerable internal and external objection. The judgement was correct and the execution was good.

Since March 2023 it has integrated a failed competitor of comparable size, has retained more of its clients than anyone expected, has returned to profit quickly, and has acquired a political problem it cannot resolve on its own terms.

The unresolved question is not about the bank. UBS is well run, adequately capitalised by present requirements and profitable. The question is whether a country of nine million people can host an institution with a balance sheet twice its economy, and the answer available to Switzerland is either to require capital that the bank says would make it uncompetitive, to break it up, which nobody has proposed seriously, or to accept a guarantee it could not honour.

Every developed country has faced some version of this question since 2008 and Switzerland's version is the most acute, because the concentration is greater and the economy is smaller. That the concentration was created by the state itself, over a weekend, in order to avoid a different failure, is the part that Swiss politics has found hardest to absorb.

Criticism

Tax facilitation produced the American, French, German, Belgian and other proceedings described above, and the American case is generally credited with ending Swiss banking secrecy.

Market manipulation in LIBOR and foreign exchange produced penalties exceeding US$2 billion.

Risk management failures produced the 2008 losses and the 2011 rogue trading loss.

The Credit Suisse acquisition has been criticised for the process, in which shareholders were excluded and bondholders were subordinated to equity; for the competitive concentration in Switzerland; and for the systemic risk created.

Climate. UBS's financing of fossil fuels has been examined by campaign groups, and the April 2025 removal of weapons restrictions from some sustainability funds drew objection from investors who had bought them on that basis.

Wealth management generally attracts the criticism that the industry facilitates the concentration of wealth and its movement across borders, and UBS, as the largest participant, receives the largest share of it.

Compensation. Ermotti's pay has been the subject of repeated Swiss political argument, and the country's 2013 referendum on executive pay, which passed with 68 per cent support, was motivated substantially by banking compensation.

Assessment

UBS is the last of the great Swiss banks and it became so by absorbing the other one in a weekend.

Its strategy since 2012, to be the world's largest wealth manager and a modest investment bank rather than a competitor to the Americans, was correct, was contested when adopted and has been imitated since. The business it chose requires little capital, produces stable fees, and is protected by client relationships that are among the most durable in finance.

The Credit Suisse acquisition was, on the terms available, an exceptional transaction. UBS paid approximately CHF 3 billion for a bank with CHF 45 billion of book value, received state guarantees against the worst of the losses, eliminated its only domestic competitor, acquired a very large quantity of wealth management assets, and has retained more of them than anyone expected.

It also acquired a set of liabilities whose extent is not yet known, a political problem that may cost it US$25 billion of capital, an integration that will occupy it for years, and a position in which the Swiss state's guarantee of the financial system now rests on one institution.

The country's difficulty is more acute than the bank's. Switzerland's prosperity depends substantially on banking, its banking depends substantially on one institution, and that institution is too large for the state to rescue. Every option available, higher capital, a break-up, relocation or acceptance, has costs that Swiss politics has not yet been willing to bear, and the argument will continue for years.

See also

• Credit Suisse
• Julius Baer
• Swiss National Bank
• Banking in Switzerland
• Deutsche Bank
• Morgan Stanley

The investment bank

UBS's investment bank is the part of the business whose history is most instructive, because it is the source of almost every loss the group has suffered and because the decision to shrink it is the source of the group's recovery.

The expansion

The Swiss Bank Corporation acquired the British merchant bank S.G. Warburg in 1995 and the American derivatives boutique O'Connor and Associates in 1992, and the Union Bank acquired Phillips and Drew in Britain.

The combined institution after 1998 inherited a substantial investment bank with genuine capability in equities and in derivatives, and it decided to build a fixed income business to match the American firms.

The fixed income build of the 2000s was funded by the group's balance sheet at internal transfer prices that did not reflect the risk, staffed by hiring from competitors at guaranteed compensation, and directed at the mortgage securitisation business that was then the industry's most profitable.

The losses

UBS's own shareholder report of April 2008, which is unusually candid, identified what happened.

The bank accumulated approximately US$100 billion of American mortgage exposure. Much of it was held not as a trading position but as inventory retained to generate the fee income from securitisation, and the risk models treated triple-A rated tranches as approximately riskless, so the positions consumed almost no risk limit.

The internal funding arrangement made the positions appear profitable, because the investment bank borrowed at a rate below the risk, and the compensation arrangements paid on the resulting revenue.

The Dillon Read Capital Management hedge fund, established within the bank in 2005 and closed in 2007, lost money and returned its positions to the balance sheet.

The total writedown exceeded US$50 billion, which relative to the bank's size was the worst in Europe.

The retreat

Ermotti's 2012 announcement withdrew UBS from most fixed income trading, eliminated approximately 10,000 positions, and reduced the investment bank's risk-weighted assets by more than half.

The strategy since has been that the investment bank exists to serve wealth management clients and corporate clients rather than to trade, that it should be capped as a proportion of the group's capital, and that UBS should compete only where it has an advantage, principally in equities, in foreign exchange and in advisory in selected sectors.

The result is an investment bank that is smaller than JPMorgan Chase's or Goldman Sachs's by an order of magnitude in risk terms, that is consistently profitable, and that does not threaten the group.

The Credit Suisse acquisition brought an investment bank UBS did not want and which it has substantially wound down, retaining the advisory and equities capability and disposing of the securitised products business to Apollo.

The 2023 weekend in detail

The events of 17 to 19 March 2023 are among the most consequential in European banking and the sequence is worth recording.

Friday 17 March. Credit Suisse's deposit outflows continued despite the CHF 50 billion liquidity facility provided two days earlier. FINMA and the Swiss National Bank concluded that the bank would not be able to open on Monday. The Federal Council, Switzerland's executive, convened.

The options considered were a state takeover and nationalisation, which the government rejected on the ground that the losses would fall on the taxpayer and that the political consequences would be severe; a resolution under the framework established after 2008, in which the bank would have been recapitalised by writing down its loss-absorbing debt and continued as a going concern, which the authorities rejected on the ground that it had never been attempted at that scale and that the consequences for confidence in other banks were unpredictable; and a sale to UBS.

Saturday 18 March. UBS conducted due diligence over approximately 48 hours on a bank with a balance sheet of CHF 530 billion, which is not a period in which such an exercise can be completed, and therefore required the state guarantee against losses in the portfolios it could not assess.

UBS's initial offer of approximately CHF 0.25 a share, valuing Credit Suisse at approximately CHF 1 billion, was rejected by the Swiss authorities as too low to be politically defensible and by Credit Suisse as insulting. The Saudi National Bank and the Qatar Investment Authority, the two largest shareholders, objected.

Sunday 19 March. The price settled at CHF 0.76 a share in UBS stock, approximately CHF 3 billion. The Federal Council issued an emergency ordinance under Article 184 of the constitution dispensing with the shareholder votes both banks' articles required. FINMA ordered the write-down of CHF 16 billion of Additional Tier 1 instruments.

The announcement was made on Sunday evening before Asian markets opened.

The following days. The European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Single Resolution Board each issued statements confirming that in their jurisdictions equity absorbs losses before Additional Tier 1 instruments, which was necessary to prevent the Swiss decision from disrupting the European market for those instruments.

The criticisms

The shareholders were excluded, which is defensible in an emergency and which sets a precedent that shareholders in Swiss banks have noted.

The bondholders were subordinated to equity, which the instruments' terms permitted and which the Federal Administrative Court found in October 2025 to have lacked a proper basis.

The resolution framework was not used, which means that fifteen years of international work on ending too big to fail was set aside at the first opportunity to apply it, a fact regulators elsewhere have discussed extensively.

The competition question was not examined, the Swiss competition authority having been effectively excluded by the emergency ordinance.

The price was very favourable to UBS, which the Swiss authorities accepted because they required UBS's agreement and had no alternative buyer.

Comparison with other large banks

JPMorgan Chase is approximately three times UBS's size by assets, holds a leading position in almost every wholesale business, and combines a very large American retail bank with the industry's strongest investment bank. Its scale advantage is the one UBS explicitly declined to contest.

Morgan Stanley is the closest strategic comparison. It made the same judgement as UBS at approximately the same time, that wealth management was the better business, and executed it through the Smith Barney and E-Trade acquisitions. Both banks now derive approximately half their revenue from wealth management and both trade at higher multiples than their trading-weighted competitors.

Goldman Sachs took the opposite decision, concluding that its advantage was in risk-taking and institutional relationships, and its attempt to add consumer banking through Marcus was abandoned at substantial cost.

HSBC and Standard Chartered compete in international banking with different geographic emphases.

Deutsche Bank attempted what UBS attempted in the 2000s, failed more completely, and retreated in 2019 along lines UBS had established seven years earlier.

BNP Paribas and Santander are the large European universal banks, both with substantial domestic retail businesses that UBS lacks outside Switzerland.

Selected statistics

• Founded: predecessors from 1862; present form 1998.
• Employees: approximately 105,000.
• Invested assets: exceeding US$6 trillion.
• Total assets: approximately CHF 1.6 trillion, roughly twice Swiss gross domestic product.
• Countries: more than 50.
• Common equity tier one ratio: approximately 14 to 15 per cent.
• Credit Suisse purchase price: approximately CHF 3 billion, against a book value of approximately CHF 45 billion.
• Additional Tier 1 instruments written down: approximately CHF 16 billion.
• State loss guarantee provided: CHF 9 billion above CHF 5 billion borne by UBS.
• Swiss National Bank liquidity made available: up to CHF 200 billion.
• Proposed additional capital requirement: in the region of CHF 22 to 26 billion.

Swiss politics and the bank

The relationship between UBS and the Swiss political system is unusually direct and has become the principal subject of Swiss economic debate.

The parliamentary inquiry

The Parliamentary Investigation Commission established after Credit Suisse's failure was only the fifth such inquiry in Swiss history, the instrument being reserved for matters of exceptional gravity.

Its report, published in December 2024, ran to several hundred pages and reached conclusions that were uncomfortable for every party.

Credit Suisse's management was found to have been the principal cause, through years of poor decisions, inadequate risk control and a compensation culture that rewarded revenue.

FINMA was found to have identified the problems, to have raised them repeatedly, and to have lacked both the powers and the determination to compel change. It had no power to fine, its enforcement was slow, and its concessions on capital treatment, in which Credit Suisse had been permitted a regulatory filter that flattered its parent company capital, were criticised sharply.

The Federal Department of Finance was criticised for insufficient preparation and for the handling of the emergency.

The recommendations included giving FINMA the power to fine, a senior managers regime assigning personal accountability, restrictions on variable compensation, and a review of the too-big-to-fail framework.

The capital argument

The government's proposals, developed through 2024 and 2025, would require UBS to hold capital against its foreign subsidiaries at substantially higher levels.

The technical point is that a parent bank currently recognises its foreign subsidiaries at a value below their book equity, on the reasoning that the equity in a subsidiary is not freely available to the parent. The proposal would require full deduction, which means UBS would need additional capital at the parent to maintain its ratios.

The government's argument is that the Credit Suisse experience demonstrated that a parent whose foreign subsidiaries' capital is trapped cannot rely on it, and that a bank twice the size of the economy must be unable to fail.

UBS's argument is that the proposal is disproportionate relative to international standards, that it would reduce the bank's ability to compete with American institutions facing lower requirements, and that capital held idle produces no benefit.

The politics do not follow conventional lines. The left supports the requirement as a constraint on a bank it distrusts. Parts of the right support it on fiscal grounds, being unwilling to underwrite a private institution. Parts of the right oppose it as an interference in a successful business. And the cantons and the business associations have divided.

The relocation question has been raised by UBS and by commentators. A move to the United States or Britain is possible in principle and difficult in practice: the bank's identity, its client base and its regulatory approvals are Swiss, no other jurisdiction would accept a balance sheet of that size without comparable requirements, and the political consequences in Switzerland would be severe. It functions principally as a negotiating position and is not entirely idle.

The public view

Swiss public opinion since March 2023 has been consistently uncomfortable. Surveys have found majorities believing that the acquisition created an unacceptable risk, that bankers' compensation is excessive, and that the authorities handled the failure poorly.

The country's relationship with its banking industry has always been ambivalent: it produces a substantial proportion of national income and it has repeatedly produced scandals that damage the country's reputation, and the 2023 events revived every element of that ambivalence at once.

The end of Swiss banking secrecy

The destruction of the Swiss banking model between 2008 and 2018 is among the more complete reversals of a national industry's basis, and UBS was the instrument of it.

How it happened

The Birkenfeld disclosure. Bradley Birkenfeld, a UBS banker in Geneva, approached the American authorities in 2007 with detailed evidence of how the bank solicited American clients and assisted concealment, including practices such as carrying diamonds in toothpaste tubes and advising clients to destroy records.

The prosecution. The Department of Justice indicted a UBS executive, threatened the bank itself, and obtained a deferred prosecution agreement in February 2009 with a US$780 million payment and the disclosure of approximately 250 names, followed by a treaty arrangement transferring approximately 4,450 more.

The cascade. Other Swiss banks were prosecuted subsequently, including Wegelin, the oldest Swiss bank, which pleaded guilty in 2013 and closed. A programme permitted Swiss banks to disclose and to pay penalties in exchange for non-prosecution, and more than 80 participated.

The legislation. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act of 2010 required foreign financial institutions to report American account holders or suffer withholding on their American income, which meant that no bank with any American business could refuse.

The multilateral arrangement. The Common Reporting Standard, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and adopted by Switzerland with effect from 2017, provides for the automatic annual exchange of account information between more than 100 jurisdictions.

What it meant

Swiss banking secrecy for foreign residents no longer exists in any meaningful sense. An account is reported to the holder's tax authority automatically and annually.

Domestic banking secrecy for Swiss residents remains, and a proposal to weaken it was rejected in a referendum.

The industry has grown regardless, which is the most interesting outcome. Assets under management in Switzerland are higher than they were in 2008, the client base is taxpaying, and the reasons people bank in Switzerland turn out to have been stability, expertise and currency rather than concealment, or at least to have been sufficiently those that the loss of the last was survivable.

Birkenfeld served forty months in prison for his own participation and received US$104 million under the whistleblower programme, which is the largest such award ever made and which produced a considerable argument about whether a participant in a crime should be rewarded for disclosing it.

The integration

The absorption of Credit Suisse is among the largest integrations attempted in banking and its mechanics are worth describing.

Scale

UBS acquired an institution with approximately CHF 530 billion of assets, approximately 45,000 employees, operations in dozens of countries, and client relationships numbering in the millions.

The combined headcount at completion was approximately 120,000 and the target is substantially lower, with reductions of approximately 3,000 in Switzerland alone announced and larger numbers elsewhere achieved through attrition and redundancy.

The sequence

Legal entity mergers came first. UBS AG and Credit Suisse AG, the parent banks, merged on 31 May 2024. The Swiss operating entities, UBS Switzerland AG and Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG, merged on 1 July 2025. Comparable mergers have been conducted in each jurisdiction.

Client migration follows, in tranches, moving accounts from Credit Suisse systems to UBS systems with their histories, instructions, collateral and regulatory records intact. Swiss client migration began in 2025.

Branch consolidation in Switzerland, where the two networks overlapped extensively, has closed a substantial number of locations.

The non-core unit holds the Credit Suisse positions UBS does not want, principally securitised products, sold to Apollo, emerging market exposures and parts of the investment bank, and is being reduced progressively.

The risks

Client attrition was the largest anticipated risk. Wealthy clients frequently held accounts at both banks and might have used the merger to diversify away. Retention has been substantially better than forecast, and the assets that left had largely done so during 2022 and early 2023 before the acquisition.

Operational failure during migration is the risk with the greatest potential consequence, since a failed migration of client accounts would be visible, immediate and damaging.

Cultural integration of two institutions that competed for 150 years, with different compensation, risk appetite and self-image, is the risk that is hardest to measure and that has historically defeated bank mergers.

Hidden liabilities in a portfolio assessed over a weekend, against which the state guarantee provides partial protection.

The outcome so far

UBS recorded a negative goodwill gain of approximately US$29 billion on the acquisition, reflecting the difference between the price and the fair value of the net assets acquired, which is an accounting entry rather than cash and which nonetheless illustrates what the bank obtained.

It returned to profitability quickly, has exceeded its cost reduction targets, has retained more clients than forecast, and has resumed share repurchases.

The integration is expected to continue into 2027.

Conclusion

UBS is the product of a century and a half of Swiss banking consolidation, and the consolidation is now complete: there is one large Swiss bank where there were two, and where there had been dozens.

Its business is the oldest in the country's financial history, the preservation and administration of other people's wealth, and it is the largest institution doing it anywhere. The characteristics that made Switzerland the place for that, neutrality, stability, currency and expertise, remain, and the one that has gone, secrecy, turned out to be less important than everyone assumed.

Its strategic history is a case study in the difference between doing what one is good at and doing what one's competitors do. For a decade after 1998 UBS attempted to be an American investment bank and nearly destroyed itself. Since 2012 it has been what it was already the best at, and it has been consistently profitable.

Its acquisition of Credit Suisse was an extraordinary piece of good fortune arranged by a government with no alternatives, and it has been executed better than comparable integrations generally are.

What remains is a question that is not really about UBS. Switzerland now depends on a single financial institution whose balance sheet exceeds its national income twice over, created by the state's own emergency action, in a country that cannot recapitalise it. There is no arrangement of capital requirements that eliminates that fact, and the argument that has occupied Swiss politics since 2023 is in substance an argument about how much a small country will pay to reduce a risk it cannot remove.

Products and services

For individuals: current and savings accounts, mortgages and Swiss retail banking; discretionary and advisory portfolio management; Lombard lending against securities; structured products; art and collectibles advisory and lending; philanthropy advice; and succession and estate planning across jurisdictions.

For family offices and ultra-high-net-worth clients: access to private markets, direct investment opportunities, co-investment alongside the bank, trading and execution, custody in multiple jurisdictions, and the family office services that replicate what a family would otherwise employ staff to do.

For institutions: asset management across equities, fixed income, hedge fund solutions, real estate and infrastructure; index and sustainable strategies; and the O'Connor alternative business.

For corporations: Swiss corporate banking, cash management, trade finance, advisory on mergers and acquisitions, equity and debt capital markets, and access to the bank's wealth management clients as investors, which is a genuine differentiator because a company raising capital may reach a very large pool of private wealth through UBS that it could not reach otherwise.

For markets: equities cash and derivatives trading, in which UBS holds a leading global position; foreign exchange, in which it is among the largest; rates and credit sized to serve clients; and research, whose Global Wealth Report and thematic work are widely read.

Environmental and social position

UBS has committed to net zero financed emissions by 2050 with interim targets, has restricted financing of thermal coal and of Arctic oil and gas, and reports under the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures framework.

Its sustainable investment offering is among the largest in the industry by assets, and the April 2025 decision to remove restrictions on some sustainability funds investing in conventional weapons manufacturers reflected the European reassessment of defence following the war in Ukraine and drew objection from investors who had bought the funds on the previous basis.

Campaign organisations have examined its fossil fuel financing and its relationships with particular clients, and the criticism is the standard one directed at large banks.

Its governance disclosure and its board composition are conventional for a European bank, with an independent chairman, a majority-independent board and annual advisory votes on compensation that have produced substantial dissent in several years.

Further notes

The name UBS is no longer an abbreviation. It derived from Union Bank of Switzerland, and after the 1998 merger the company determined that it would not stand for anything, in order that neither predecessor's name would dominate.

The three keys in the logo come from the Swiss Bank Corporation and represent confidence, security and discretion, and were retained rather than the Union Bank's mark in the merger, which was itself a subject of negotiation.

The dual headquarters in Zurich and Basel reflect the 1998 merger of a Zurich bank and a Basel bank and has been maintained for reasons that are principally political.

The Swiss finish describes the practice of imposing capital requirements above the Basel minimum on Swiss banks, adopted after 2008 on the reasoning that Switzerland's banks are very large relative to its economy, and the post-Credit Suisse proposals would extend it further.

Too big to fail legislation was enacted in Switzerland in 2011 and 2012 and was not applied in March 2023, which is the fact that has most occupied regulators internationally since.

The systemic question

The concern UBS presents is one every jurisdiction has faced and none has resolved satisfactorily, and Switzerland's version is the most extreme.

The arithmetic

A bank with assets of CHF 1.6 trillion in an economy producing approximately CHF 800 billion a year cannot be recapitalised by its government in a crisis. A loss of 5 per cent of assets would exceed the federal budget.

This is not unique in kind. Iceland's banks in 2008 were approximately ten times its economy and their failure produced a national crisis from which the country took a decade to recover. Ireland's guarantee of its banks in 2008 required a European rescue of the state itself.

It is unusual in degree among developed economies of Switzerland's size and wealth.

The available responses

More capital reduces the probability of failure without eliminating it, and each additional unit reduces the bank's returns and therefore its ability to compete for the capital it needs. This is the government's proposal.

Structural separation, splitting the Swiss domestic bank from the international business so that the part the country must protect is small enough to protect, has been discussed and not proposed formally. It would reduce the group's value substantially and the bank opposes it.

Relocation removes the problem from Switzerland and removes a very large industry with it, and no serious Swiss political actor advocates it.

Acceptance means acknowledging that the state guarantees the bank implicitly, which lowers the bank's funding cost, which is a subsidy, and which is the position the international regulatory programme since 2008 was designed to eliminate.

Resolution is the official answer: the bank would be recapitalised by converting its loss-absorbing debt into equity and would continue operating under new ownership. It has never been tested at this scale, and the Swiss authorities declined to test it in March 2023 when they had the opportunity, which is the fact that undermines confidence in it.

Why it is not only Switzerland's problem

UBS is designated globally systemically important, operates in more than 50 countries, and holds assets for clients worldwide. Its failure would not be contained.

The international arrangements for resolving such a bank require cooperation between the home regulator and each host, and the Credit Suisse experience demonstrated that a home regulator under pressure may act unilaterally and outside the framework, which is precisely what host regulators fear and which is why several have pressed for capital to be held locally rather than at the parent.

That pressure is itself part of why the Swiss proposal exists: if foreign regulators trap capital in their jurisdictions, the parent cannot rely on it, which is the technical point underlying the deduction requirement.

The question has no solution that satisfies everyone, and it will occupy Swiss and international regulatory policy for the remainder of the decade.