Lun, 11 de Mar de 2024
As Sergio Ermotti’s tenure as UBS CEO is seen as transitional, speculation mounts over his successor, with internal candidates leading the prospects.
The UBS Board of Directors is already asking itself who will one day succeed Sergio Ermotti as CEO. The probability that an internal candidate will win the race is relatively high.
It should be clear that Ermotti’s return to the CEO post a year ago is only planned for a transitional period: he will stay “at least until ‘the job’ is done”, Ermotti himself said when he took up the post. The Ticino native will turn 64 in May. If the CS integration is completed by the end of 2026, he would therefore be 66 years old.
However, speculation is already rife as to who will succeed him. The names circulating on the market are almost exclusively candidates from within UBS. Iqbal Khan, Head of Global Asset Management, and Sabine Keller-Busse, Head of UBS Switzerland, have been mentioned time and again.
Investment bank boss Rob Karofsky, the new head of asset management Aleksandar Ivanovic and Beatriz Martin Jimenez, who is responsible for the wind-up unit in the course of the CS restructuring and for sustainability at the big bank, among other things, have also recently been brought into play. However, their chances are likely to be limited – at least from today’s perspective.
Iqbal Khan, who is said to have a good relationship with Ermotti, is the clear favourite. The latter also brought Khan to UBS in 2019. Initially, he shared the management of the global wealth management business with Tom Naratil from the US. Since July 2022, however, he has been the sole head of UBS’s core division and would therefore actually be predestined for the CEO job.
Sabine Keller-Busse is also said to have good chances. This would make her the first woman to head up operations at Switzerland’s largest bank. What also helps is that, like Khan, she is also Swiss.
In the past, it has long been an unwritten law that either the CEO or the Chairman of Switzerland’s largest bank is held by a Swiss national. However, this rule was broken for the first time with the appointment of Dutchman Ralph Hamers in November 2020.
Recently, however, the name of a long-standing UBS manager who already had ambitions for the CEO position at Switzerland’s largest bank and was also repeatedly mentioned as a possible CEO of the scandal-ridden bank during the CS crisis has resurfaced.
Andrea Orcel, the former head of the UBS investment bank, has been spotted in Zurich and is soon to become co-CEO alongside Ermotti and later replace him completely, writes the financial blog “Inside Paradeplatz”. Orcel – also known for high salaries and high salary demands – has been CEO of Italian UniCredit since April 2021.
©Keystone/SDA
Spanish 
English 
German 
French 
Arabic