Liquidity and funding management

Liquidity and funding management are critical to a financial institution. Liquidity must be continuously managed to ensure that the firm can survive a crisis, whether it is a general market event, a localized difficulty affecting a smaller number of institutions, or a problem unique to an individual firm. An institution that is unable to meet its liabilities when they fall due may collapse, even though it is not insolvent, because it is unable to borrow on an unsecured basis, or does not have sufficient good quality assets to borrow against or liquid assets to sell to raise immediate cash without severely damaging its net asset value. At UBS, we manage our liquidity position in order to be able to ride out a crisis without damaging the on-going viability of our business. This is complemented by our funding risk management which aims to achieve the optimal liability structure to finance our businesses cost-efficiently and reliably. The long term stability and security of our funding in turn helps protect our liquidity position in the event of a UBS-specific crisis.

Our business activities generate asset and liability portfolios which are intrinsically highly diversified with respect to market, product and currency. This reduces our exposure to individual funding sources, and also provides a broad range of investment opportunities, which in turn reduces liquidity risk. We adopt a centralized approach to liquidity and funding management to exploit these advantages to the full.

The liquidity and funding process is undertaken jointly by our Treasury department, which is part of Corporate Center, and the Investment Bank’s Cash and Collateral Trading unit (CCT). Treasury establishes a comprehensive control framework, while CCT undertakes operational cash and collateral management transactions within the established parameters. This centralized cash and collateral management structure permits tight control of both our global cash position and our stock of highly liquid securities.

Our central treasury process ensures that our general access to wholesale cash markets is concentrated in CCT. As a rule, all funds raised externally are channelled into CCT including the proceeds of debt securities issued by UBS, an activity for which Treasury is responsible. CCT in turn meets all internal demands for funding by channelling funds from units generating surplus cash to those requiring finance. In this way, we minimize our external borrowing and use of available credit lines, and present a consistent and co-ordinated face to the market.

Liquidity approach

Our approach to liquidity management, which covers all branches and subsidiaries, is to ensure that we will always have sufficient liquidity to meet liabilities when due, under both normal and stressed conditions, without incurring unacceptable losses or risking sustained damage to our various business franchises. Our integrated framework incorporates an assessment of all material, known and expected cash flows and the level of high-grade collateral that could be used to raise additional funding. This framework entails both careful monitoring and control of our daily liquidity position, and regular liquidity stress testing. Risk limits are set by the GEB and monitored by Treasury and contingency plans for a liquidity crisis are incorporated into our general crisis management process.

The liquidity position is assessed and managed under a variety of potential scenarios encompassing both normal market conditions and stressed conditions. We consider not only general market crises but also the possibility that our access to markets could be impacted by a stress event affecting some part of our business or, in the extreme case, if we were to suffer a severe rating downgrade.

Liquidity position

The daily liquidity position – the net cumulative funding requirement for a specific day – is projected under conservative assumptions for each business day from the current day out to one month to produce a cumulative “cash ladder”.

The starting point for these analyses is a breakdown of the contractual maturity of our assets and liabilities. This is displayed in note 28 to the financial statements, which shows the contractual profile of UBS’s overall cash flow under a “business as usual” scenario on 31 December 2005. Since a liquidity crisis could have a myriad of causes, we then focus on a worst-case scenario that encompasses all potential stress effects across all markets, currencies and products.

We assess the likelihood of maturing assets and liabilities being rolled over in a UBS-specific crisis, and gauge the extent to which the potential crisis-induced shortfall could be covered by available funding. This would be raised on a secured basis against available collateral, which includes securities eligible for pledging at the major central banks, or by selling liquid inventory. In both cases we apply crisis-level discounts to the value of the assets. We assume that we would be unable to renew any of our unsecured debt, including all our maturing money market papers (outstanding volume CHF 102.7 billion on 31 December 2005) and that no contingency funding could be raised on an unsecured basis. We also factor in potential liquidity outflows from contingent liabilities, in particular those due to the drawdown of committed credit lines. Exposures to other contingent commitments, such as guarantees and letters of credit, are included in this analysis, although they are not as vulnerable since they are generally not unconditional but, rather, are linked to other, independent conditions being fulfilled.

This scenario also assumes that the crisis would engulf UBS’s source of retail deposits, thereby leading to heavy withdrawals from current accounts, savings accounts and deposits. Furthermore, access to the client collateral pool is assumed to be restricted as a result of securities lending agreements being cancelled during such a crisis.

We regularly monitor unutilized committed credit facilities and latent liquidity risks that could materialize if we were to suffer a downgrade. “Rating trigger” clauses, especially in derivative contracts, can result in an immediate cash outflow due to the unwinding of derivative positions, or the need to deliver additional collateral. Our contingent exposure arising directly from these rating triggers is judged not to be material compared to our liquidity-generation capacity, even in a crisis situation. We also analyze the potential impact on our net liquidity position of adverse movements in the replacement values of our OTC derivative transactions which are subject to bilateral collateral arrangements. Given the diversity of our derivatives business and our counterparties, there is not necessarily a direct correlation between the factors influencing net replacement values with each counterparty and a firm-specific crisis scenario. It is, nonetheless, conceivable that market volatility could substantially increase under such circumstances and exacerbate our situation.

Liquidity limits and controls

While UBS’s estimated capacity to generate liquidity when required will naturally vary, we generally apply a constant limit structure, which imposes a ceiling on the projected net funding requirement along the cash ladder. We base our limits on the amount of cash we believe we could raise in a worst case scenario – a firm-specific crisis. The limits vary by time-zone since access to liquidity will depend on the time of day – at the beginning of the global trading day, during Asia-Pacific trading hours, the limits are less severe since more time is available to mobilize funding sources or, if necessary, initiate asset sales to generate additional liquidity. As the day proceeds and currency zones begin to close, the limits become tighter, with the strictest limits applied later in the day when only the US markets are available. CCT’s day-to-day liquidity management is based on global books that are handed over from time-zone to time-zone, ensuring 24-hour coverage. Compliance with the risk limits and actual credit liquidity exposures are regularly reported to the GEB.

To complement and support the limit framework, regional teams monitor the markets in which UBS operates for potential threats and regularly report any findings to Treasury. We have also developed detailed contingency plans for liquidity crisis management as an integral part of our global crisis management concept, which covers all types of crisis events. The liquidity contingency plan would be implemented under a core crisis team with representatives from Treasury, which is the liquidity risk control unit, from CCT, which is the primary liquidity manager, and from related areas including the functions responsible for payments and settlements, market and credit risk control, collateral and margin management, and IT and infrastructure. The cornerstone of our contingency plans is our access to secured funding either from the market or from the major central banks, coupled with the ability to turn sufficient liquid assets into cash within a short timeframe. Moreover, CCT’s centralized global management model lends itself naturally to efficient liquidity crisis management.

We are continuing to strengthen our relationships with the major central banks, consistent with our general policy, which is to base our contingency plans on secured funding against pledges of high-quality collateral, rather than relying on third-party credit lines.

While we engage in financial transactions that involve the utilization of non-consolidated special-purpose entities, our funding and liquidity capacity is not reliant upon these entities to any material extent. Additionally, should any or all of these financial channels become unusable, the impact on UBS’s liquidity resources would be insignificant. All of UBS’s major sources of liquidity are channelled through entities that are fully consolidated and are included in the scenario analyses described above.

Funding sources and approach

With a broad diversification of funding sources (by market, product and currency), we maintain a well-balanced portfolio of liabilities, which generates a stable flow of financing and provides protection in the event of market disruptions. This, together with our centralized funding management, enables us to pursue a strategy to fund business activities at the lowest possible cost.

In this context, UBS’s strong domestic retail business is a very valuable, cost-efficient and reliable source of funding. Furthermore, through the establishment of short-, medium- and long-term funding programs in Europe, the US and Asia, we can provide specialized investments to our customers while efficiently raising funds globally from both institutional and private investors, minimizing our dependence on any particular source.

We plan our medium- and long-term funding activities by assessing the overall funding profile of the balance sheet, taking due account of the effective maturity of our asset base and the amount of maturing debt that will have to be replaced. We also factor in our ability to continue to fund our ongoing business activities through periods of difficult market conditions.

To ensure that we preserve a well-balanced and diversified liability structure, Treasury routinely monitors UBS’s funding status and reports its findings on a quarterly basis to the GEB. We employ two main analysis tools – “cash capital” and “secured funding capacity”. We complement these analyses with regular assessments of any concentration risks in our main funding portfolios.

Cash capital is the excess of our long-term funding over the total of illiquid assets. “Long-term” and “illiquid” both refer to a time horizon of one year.

The secured funding capacity concept ensures that short-term unsecured (wholesale) funding is effectively only invested in freely marketable (“unencumbered”) assets. As a precautionary measure, we maintain a minimum stock of unencumbered assets and cash that exceed our outstanding short-term unsecured wholesale borrowings. The discounts we apply in assessing the surplus are more severe than those applied in the cash capital analysis since the secured funding capacity represents a stressed scenario, as it assumes we would have no access to wholesale unsecured funding markets for an entire year.

We make frequent use of asset-securitization structures, in particular in connection with the sale of corporate loans and retail mortgages. These do not, however, constitute a material portion of UBS’s funding activities and our funding status would not be significantly affected if capital markets were to become inaccessible for such securitization transactions. UBS has no long-term commitments to continue to purchase the types of assets being securitized.

The charts below show a breakdown by product type and by currency of our secured and unsecured funding as at 31 December 2005. UBS has a strong secured funding base that reduces our exposure to periods of stressed market conditions when the ability to raise unsecured funding could be temporarily restricted. Of our total funding, 39% was raised on a secured basis and 61% unsecured. The unsecured funding base is well diversified, with 17% of total funding stemming from savings and demand deposits, 12% from long-term debt, 10% from time deposits, 9% from short-term interbank borrowing, 7% from money market papers and 4% from fiduciary deposits. Most of our funding is originated in US dollars, with major portions also being raised in Swiss francs and in euros, roughly mirroring the currency breakdown of our assets. Around 16% of our funding was denominated in other currencies (primarily UK sterling and Japanese yen). UBS does not rely on buying committed credit facilities from third-party banks, but instead we base our contingent funding sources on our ability to raise secured funding through the use of high-quality collateral.