The new UBS in figures
Published: Friday, Mar 15th 2024, 11:20
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With the takeover of Credit Suisse, UBS has once again grown significantly in size. It now has total assets twice as large as the Swiss GDP.
The new banking group comprising UBS and CS had total assets of USD 1,718 billion at the end of 2023, of which around two thirds came from the old UBS and one third from the former CS. This is more than twice as much as the entire Swiss gross domestic product (GDP).
While there are still significantly larger banks in terms of total assets in Europe and above all in the USA and China, but also in Japan, UBS is a global heavyweight, particularly in wealth management. Together with Credit Suisse, a giant has been created with assets under management amounting to 5.7 trillion dollars. Before the takeover, UBS managed client assets of just under 4 trillion dollars and Credit Suisse around 1.3 trillion Swiss francs.
With the CS takeover, UBS was able to grow not only in traditional wealth management with wealthy private clients, but also in asset management, the wealth management business for institutional clients such as pension funds.
The combined bank now also reached a critical mass in this rather low-margin business: the takeover made UBS number three in Europe and number eleven worldwide.
Undisputed Swiss market leader
Meanwhile, investment banking is still a major construction site. Until recently, CS still had a comparatively large investment banking division in relation to the overall size of the bank, while UBS had already placed more emphasis on asset management over ten years ago as a result of the financial crisis.
UBS intends to follow this example with the restructuring of Credit Suisse and significantly reduce CS's risky and capital-intensive trading business, which is primarily based in the USA. It remains to be seen exactly what the Investment Bank will look like in the end.
In its home market of Switzerland, where Credit Suisse was also very strong - particularly in the corporate client business - the combined company has also become an even greater force and is the undisputed market leader. Combined client deposits reached around CHF 270 billion at the end of 2023 and the credit volume exceeded CHF 280 billion. UBS thus also overtook the previous leader Raiffeisen Switzerland.
UBS is also a giant in terms of employees. In terms of full-time equivalents, the big bank employed almost 113,000 people worldwide at the end of 2023, around 30 percent of them in Switzerland. A year earlier, there were almost 73,000 people at UBS and over 50,000 at CS combined, around 10,000 more.
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