UBS expanding in Europe
Switzerland's largest banking group, UBS, has announced plans to open offices in several French cities, starting with Lyon, as part of a Europe-wide expansion aimed at wealthy private clients.
The move follows a decision to set up UBS (France), the Swiss group’s private bank in Paris, in June 1999. The French operation now employs 110 staff.
As a next step UBS (France) has opened a branch in Lyon, which now employs eight people.
“There are also plans to open offices in Bordeaux, Marseilles, Lille, Nantes and Strasbourg,” UBS said in a statement.
In an interview with the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Wednesday, Marcel Ospel, chairman of UBS, said that his bank is looking to expand its asset management business across Europe.
Ospel said the bank, which is one of the world’s largest private wealth managers, would focus on organic growth to expand its business with wealthy and super-wealthy clients in key European countries, although he did not rule out acquisitions.
“We are limiting ourselves to five markets and are using UBS’s existing platform, as in Germany, for example. It is possible that here or there we make an acquisition but the focus is on organic growth,” he said.
UBS had assets under management of roughly SFr2.4 trillion ($1.352 trillion) at the end of the first quarter of 2001.
Ospel also told the newspaper that the bank does not need to take a stake in a German bank to strengthen distribution. However, UBS could see its ties strengthened to German banks as an investment-product wholesaler.
“But for that we don’t need to take a stake in a German financial institution that is active in the standard private-client business,” Ospel told the newspaper.
Ospel said he hoped the group’s investment bank, UBS Warburg, would become one of the top three players in US mergers and acquisitions within three years. He said the main focus here was fortifying recruitment and organic growth.
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