UBS Adds 400 Credit Suisse Bankers to Trading Unit

This content was published on February 13, 2024 - 14:01

2 minutes

(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG seems to have made up its mind how many Credit Suisse traders it wants to keep after acquiring the smaller rival last year.

The Swiss lenders seeks to “drive incremental client flow across derivatives and solutions, execution services, and financing with support from around 400 Credit Suisse colleagues joining our markets business,” Chief Financial Officer Todd Tuckner said on an earnings call on Thursday.

A few months after UBS agreed to take over Credit Suisse last year, it signaled it would shutter about two-thirds of the erstwhile rival’s investment bank by putting the assets in the wind-down unit. The lender said it wanted to get rid of riskier trading operations and would be “extremely selective” in taking on trading and derivative assets but it never specified how many trading staff it was planning to retain.

Read More: UBS Signals Most of Credit Suisse Investment Bank to Shut

Now, the remaining parts of the Credit Suisse investment bank are emerging as an important element of Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti’s growth strategy. The division will be among the fastest growing over the coming years, according to an investor presentation.

“In our investment bank, we’re well-positioned to achieve revenue accretion relatively quickly, especially as we’re selectively adding key Credit Suisse IB resources directly to the UBS platform,” Tuckner said on the call. “As a result, we accelerate our IB strategy by doubling our banking presence in the US.”

The bank also said it expects the investment bank to be profitable in the first quarter after several consecutive quarterly losses.

While Ermotti declined to provide more details on job cuts when asked during a Bloomberg TV interview, Tuckner said about half of the roughly $13 billion in promised cost savings will be “personnel-related.”