Expertise in harnessing technology to provide clients with top-quality advice and execution is an important ingredient in UBS’s success. At the same time, electronic channels bolster earnings by honing efficiency and freeing staff to concentrate on tasks that add greater value.
The Equities Client Portal, for example, a website that pulls together most of the equities business’s online products and services, attracts more than 7,500 client users every month. The portal offers such innovative tools as interactive valuation models and an option volatility monitor, as well as access to UBS’s proprietary convertible bond indices. Using the portal’s stockscreening facility, clients can sort through more than 3,000 companies by more than 170 criteria.
Clients can also take complete control of their orders using the UBS Equity Trader, a proprietary, web-based cash equity trading tool featuring instant monitoring of trade positions and average execution prices.
This is part of the UBS eExecution suite of connectivity options that enable authorized clients to transmit orders electronically to more than 85 stock exchanges globally, using the UBS equity-trading infrastructure.
The suite includes DMA (Direct Market Access). Using this popular online order-routing service, clients can trade directly on the stock exchange of their choice without the need for exchange membership.
Using in-house developed technology tools such as KeyInvest and Equity Investor, intermediary clients – among them private banks and Wealth Management financial advisors – can also access structured products and derivatives. The tools provide them with education, research, news and pricing information for both structured products and the underlying equities. In addition, they allow UBS client advisors to tailor products online that match the needs and risk appetite of their clients.
Technology is also an integral part of sales management. Every month, more than 2,600 staff across the Equities and Fixed Income, Rates and Currencies businesses worldwide use RADAR (Rapid Access to Distribution and Research), a client relationship management application. RADAR logs all contact details, client interactions, feedback, marketing activities and revenue information, allowing the firm to analyze client profitability efficiently.
These capabilities have not gone unnoticed in the marketplace. In the prestigious Thomson Extel Survey 2004, UBS again placed first for both Pan-European Equity Sales and Trading & Execution, awards UBS has won every year since their inception in 2002. The awards reflect UBS’s success in applying technology to empower its clients and, in so doing, transform this sector of the financial industry.
