UBS Builds Its Investment Prowess

When UBS wealth manager Abdallah Najia came to Switzerland from Dubai in March for a week of training with 34 colleagues, he was stunned by what he heard. “The first couple of days have been shocking,” said Najia, who advises clients with more than $50 million to invest, during a break between lectures at UBS-owned Seepark Thun Congress Hotel on Lake Thun. “They sort of cut our legs off and said, ‘You guys are at risk of extinction.’ We need to evolve.”

The shock therapy was part of an effort to reinvent the wealth-management business, which suffered during the financial crisis and after the bank’s admission in 2009 that it helped Americans evade taxes. From the end of March 2008 through June 2010, assets fell 20 percent. Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti’s goal is to have the wealth management units contribute half of the company’s pretax profit by 2015, up from 32 percent in 2005. To get there, Juerg Zeltner, who heads UBS wealth management outside the Americas, says the bank needs to establish a reputation for investment expertise that it didn’t need in the past, when the promise of Swiss privacy and discretion was enough to draw clients.