- Five-year plan to significantly scale the expertise to better serve female clients
- Launch of education initiative to increase financial confidence of one million women by 2021
Zurich, 24 January 2017 – UBS Wealth Management today announced a five-year plan to make it a business priority to significantly scale its expertise developed to better serve female clients. The business has been piloting and developing approaches to better serve female clients for the past two years and will now scale these learnings across its organization.
The findings from the past two years of work on this topic show that in stark contrast to men, women are much more focused on investing to achieve positive social change. According to the Center for Talent Innovation, 88% of women want to invest in organizations that promote social wellbeing1. According to new data from UBS, female investors could be set to invest USD 2.3 trillion2 in improving social good by 2021.
Women also want to be served with a different dialogue that places greater focus on their aspirations as opposed to pure investment outcomes. As a consequence, UBS Wealth Management will broaden the dialogue it has with clients to include the purpose of wealth based on four core dimensions: business, investments, family and legacy.
Specifically, UBS Wealth Management will implement the following:
- Embed a female / gender view in all its standard processes and measure, as a standard, client satisfaction according to gender.
- Establish a dedicated advisory board representing a variety of different interests and backgrounds.
- Continue to evolve its offering to include more sustainability, diversity and long-term investment opportunities for clients and refocus its advisory capabilities by training client advisors to deliver an even more holistic and value-focused view of wealth.
- Continue to make its own workforce more diverse and inclusive and progress towards its ambition of increasing the ratio of women in management roles from a quarter to a third.
In addition to scaling the expertise developed over the past two years, UBS Wealth Management also aims to launch an education initiative in partnership with leading education organizations to increase the financial confidence of one million women by 2021. Research suggests that less than one in five (19%) women say they are confident about their financial knowledge, compared to over a third of men (34%)1.
Jürg Zeltner, President UBS Wealth Management, said; “Research shows that women are not adequately served by wealth managers today and this represents a huge opportunity. We’re making it a business priority to significantly scale up the changes we’ve piloted across our Wealth Management business to better serve female clients and are aiming to kick-start long-term change across the financial industry to better serve women. The societal and economic benefits are significant if the industry can get it right.”
Mara Harvey, Managing Director UBS Wealth Management and head of the program, added: “Later this year we'll launch a bespoke financial education program in partnership with leading education organizations to increase the financial confidence of at least one million women by 2021. The idea is to give the next generation of female investors the expertise and knowledge needed to make the most of their wealth.”
These efforts build upon successful programs UBS already has in place in the US such as the Women's Symposium, an annual comprehensive workshop launched in 2012 that focuses on opportunities and challenges unique to women through a wealth management boot camp and discussion with experts on relevant topics such as values, legacy and philanthropy. In addition, UBS Wealth Management Americas offers a Financial Education Program for its clients' families that can begin as early as elementary school age and run through adulthood to help them feel more confident about their entire family's financial understanding and future. UBS also offers a wider range of bespoke female platforms in Europe, Emerging Markets and APAC. Among them is a flagship series, “Be Inspired”, which is being held for the third time and brings together female thought leaders globally, as well as “Women as a force of change” in Asia.
About UBS
We are committed to providing our clients with superior financial advice and solutions while generating attractive and sustainable returns for shareholders. Our strategy centers on our leading wealth management businesses and our premier universal bank in Switzerland, enhanced by our strong asset manager and investment bank. These businesses share three key characteristics: they benefit from a strong competitive position in their targeted markets, are capital-efficient, and offer a superior structural growth and profitability outlook. Our strategy builds on the strengths of all of our businesses and focuses our efforts on areas in which we excel, while seeking to capitalize on the compelling growth prospects in the businesses and regions in which we operate. Capital strength is the foundation of our success.
UBS Group AG
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