UBS’s Kelleher Floats Ermotti as Successor in Bilanz Interview

(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG Chairman Colm Kelleher touted the idea of Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti as his potential successor, a comment that will add to speculation about how the bank’s leadership ranks could change in the coming years.

Kelleher would be happy for Ermotti to take his role in the right circumstances and if there’s an “appropriate” cooling-off period, he said in an interview with Swiss publication Bilanz.

UBS’s top leadership steers the world’s biggest wealth manager and Switzerland’s largest bank by far, making the chairmanship and the CEO role two of the most important posts in the country’s dominant finance sector.

The roles have taken on added significance as UBS is working through the integration of its former competitor Credit Suisse, which it agreed to buy in a rescue operation in early 2023. UBS’s leadership is also trying to convince the Swiss government to water down planned changes to bank regulation that could impose as much as $26 billion in fresh capital requirements on the bank.

UBS is considering moving its headquarters out of Switzerland as a reaction to those demands, Bloomberg News has reported. UBS is doing everything it can to find a solution that would allow the bank to remain in the country, Kelleher said in the interview.

Ermotti took on the CEO role at UBS in the immediate aftermath of the Credit Suisse deal, returning him to a post he previously held from 2011 until 2020. He said last year he will stay “until the integration is finished, so that means end of 2026, early 2027.”

It’s “absolutely essential” for the bank to have a combination of Swiss and non-Swiss people as chairman and as CEO given UBS’s global business, Kelleher said in the Bilanz interview. It’s a common in Swiss corporate governance that at least one of the two roles is held by a Swiss national.

–With assistance from Jan-Henrik Förster.

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