UBS CEO Ermotti Says Cyber Risks Rival Traditional Bank Threats
(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG’s chief executive said guarding against cyber attacks has become as important as — if not more important than — managing traditional credit and market risks, as such threats across the banking sector grow in frequency and sophistication.
These cyber risks are increasing “exponentially” and represent “the price to be paid for all this innovation and digitalization,” Sergio Ermotti said during a panel at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit. Good governance, clear accountability and the ability to react quickly in this environment are key, he added.
“It’s pretty much at the center of risk management in a bank today,” Ermotti said. “I think that for everybody is the same.”
Barclays Plc’s CEO CS Venkatakrishnan echoed those comments on the same panel, saying that cybersecurity is the overriding risk for large institutions. In recent weeks, financial firms in Japan and South Korea have been hit by cyber attacks that resulted in client information being leaked, pushing local authorities to respond quickly.
“We prioritize being up and being reliable,” said Venkatakrishnan. “But increasingly we’re going to make trade-offs between that stability and the requirement to make rapid changes to your systems, putting in patches so that you reduce the vulnerability.”
State Street Corp. Chairman and CEO Ron O’Hanley said there needs to be collaboration at speed among firms by recognizing the network is only as strong as the weakest link.
“There was a divide and conquer approach in terms of how we worked with the open source providers, how we worked with third party providers,” O’Hanley said. But “this idea that you can kind of keep it secret and, you know, do the work amongst a small group doesn’t make sense.”
Ermotti also said one of the biggest issues to address as a society is “making sure we don’t stigmatize too much when somebody is going through a cyber event.” He added this will help in creating resilience in the system.
Produced with the assistance of Bloomberg AI.
–With assistance from Kiuyan Wong, Denise Wee and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen.
©2026 Bloomberg L.P.
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