Powerful yet close

When clients walk through the door at UBS they are typically aware of a small part of the firm, most often represented by the familiar face of their advisor. Yet by any measure UBS is one of the largest and most powerful financial institutions in the world, offering a vast range of products and services. UBS, however, is about more than just size. It is also about the integration of all its parts into a smoothly functioning whole. This is at the heart of its “one-firm” approach to business, a philosophy designed to unlock all the resources of the firm for each client, every day. It is an approach that makes UBS a very powerful ally, as its more than 69,500 employees can attest.

Just ask Roland Jossi, a desk head with the wealth management business in Hong Kong. A native Swiss who has been living in Asia for more than 15 years, Jossi deals daily with private clients who have very specific and often complex needs. “There was an American citizen we were in touch with,” he relates,”owner of a very successful business in Asia, who was looking for specific financial services in the United States. We were able to arrange a meeting in New York with our colleagues from Global Asset Management, who flew in, at short notice, from Chicago to make the presentation. The client was very impressed, and is now also talking with the Investment Bank in Asia about a potential IPO.”

For Robert Beighton of the UK real estate team in the global asset management business, it is also a question of give and take. “When talking to clients, we let them know about products from all over the firm. And being real estate professionals, we are often asked to advise people from other parts of the firm when they are looking to structure property deals for clients.”

Sharing expertise is second nature to Cliodhna Tyrrell. Also based in London, she is a project manager for UBS’s WIRE application. WIRE makes equity research information available externally to clients, via the Equities Client Portal, as well as internally across the firm. For her, IT’s key contribution to the “one-firm” strategy lies in its ability to bring the disparate parts of the organization together, so that clients can benefit from the sum of the firm’s knowledge. “Information technology is all about cooperation and communication between different Business Groups and teams – every bit of work we do is geared to that.”

In the United States, Lili Marlene Trudeau interprets UBS’s “one-firm” strategy as a question of doing that “little bit extra” for clients. An administrative manager in Rhode Island, her main job is to answer client inquiries and assist wealth management advisors when they are out of the office. But when she can, she says, she offers alternatives to get administrative or operational tasks completed more efficiently, as she did recently when she was able to suggest a simplified method for receiving dividend payments for a large client. For her, what is most important is keeping up with change. “I see each day how we need to change and adapt to be the best in the industry,” she says. “If we do not grow and develop with the changes around us we will be left behind. Change will happen, so it is best to be the one in the lead.”In Zurich, Faramarz Ganjizadeh is used to change. He is responsible for a new client hotline set up recently to provide worldwide support to the firm’s institutional securities-backed lending customers who use UBS’s KeyLend platform. For Ganjizadeh, support means more than just answering questions. “If clients also have questions about the product or any other thing and they aren’t sure who to contact at UBS, they come to us and then we take care of the rest,” he says. If in the course of his work he can reach out beyond his particular area of expertise to help a client, all the better. “Last year there was a situation within the Investment Bank where a certain counterparty had difficulty delivering securities to UBS,” he says. “The question came up of whether we could lend the securities to the client. I tied up the strings with our Securities Lending department, the delivery problem was solved, and we were able to do the transaction.”

Nadja Good works in controlling in Zurich. She is responsible, along with her colleagues, for taking the financial results from all the Business Groups, analyzing them for management reporting, and preparing the data for the various external publications. Using UBS’s consolidation and reporting system, she can survey financial data from all over the firm – at the highest, most consolidated levels, or by drilling down to the most minute of detail. Her job, she says, “is to analyze the figures, and the explanations that go with them.” In this way, she contributes to reporting to senior management and to making UBS transparent to its clients and investors – when you read the financial charts and tables in this publication, you’ll be seeing the fruits of her labor. For her, “one-firm” means that everyone, both those on the front and those behind the scenes, work hand in hand to satisfy clients. This attitude, reflecting one of the core values of the organization, helps make UBS both truly powerful, yet at the same time close.