The making of UBS

All the firms that have come to make up today’s UBS look back on a long and illustrious history. Both the two Swiss predecessor banks and PaineWebber came into being in the second half of the 19th century, while SG Warburg’s roots go back to 1934. But it is in the 1990s that UBS’s current identity began to form.

In the early 1990s, the two Swiss banks that are part of the current UBS, Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland, were commercial banks operating mainly out of Switzerland. The two banks shared a similar vision: to become a world leader in wealth management and a global bulge-bracket investment bank with a strong position in global asset management, while remaining an important commercial and retail bank in Switzerland.

Union Bank of Switzerland, the largest and best-capitalized Swiss bank, opted to pursue a strategy of organic growth, or expansion by internal means. In contrast, SBC, then the third-largest Swiss bank, decided to take another route by starting a joint venture with O’Connor, a leading US derivatives firm that was fully acquired by SBC in 1992. O’Connor was noted for its young, dynamic and innovative culture, its meritocracy and team-orientation. It brought state-of-the-art risk management and derivatives technology to SBC. In 1994, SBC acquired Brinson Partners, one of the leading US-based institutional asset management firms. Both the O’Connor and Brinson deals represented fundamental steps in the development of the firm.

The next major move was in 1995, when SBC merged with S.G. Warburg, the British merchant bank. The deal helped to fill SBC’s strategic gaps in corporate finance, brokerage and research and, most importantly, brought with it an institutional client franchise, which is still at the core of today’s equities business.

The 1998 merger of Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland brought together these two leading Swiss financial institutions, creating the world leader in wealth management and improving the new firm’s chances of becoming a bulge-bracket investment bank, not to mention providing it with greater capital strength.

But there was still a major item left on the firm’s broader strategic agenda. It needed to establish a significant presence in the key US market to be a truly global player in investment banking and wealth management, both of which are “scale” businesses – meaning that size matters. That was achieved when PaineWebber became a part of UBS in 2000.

Following its successful integration into our business, and after a decade of transformational change, we decided that we had in place all the fundamental parts of the business that we wanted to build. The task then was to improve them and make them work together. We therefore adopted a strategy based primarily on organic growth aided by carefully chosen acquisitions.

Our determination to define the future as “one firm” was visibly demonstrated in 2003 when we introduced UBS as a single brand for all our businesses.