Congratulations on your win at Global Custodian’s Leaders in Custody Awards. What, in your opinion, were the contributing factors behind the successful year that led to this award?
We are honored that UBS Switzerland has been recognised as the “Best Custodian in Western Europe” at Global Custodian’s Leaders in Custody Awards. This award reflects a year of strong performance, underpinned by the following key factors: our steadfast commitment to client centricity, our dedication to going the extra mile, and our deep expertise and innovative mindset in meeting client needs.
By understanding our clients’ evolving needs and delivering tailored, high-impact solutions, we created strong value and a seamless experience. We are particularly proud to have achieved the highest score in Western Europe for relationship management. Our personalised, timely, and relevant advisory services were especially praised, affirming our ongoing focus on world-class holistic custody advisory.
Recognitions like this not only affirm our efforts but also provide a valuable opportunity for reflection and improvement. These awards inspire us to continue striving for excellence.
Could you outline some of the main achievements and milestones from the year?
As you may be aware, we have successfully rolled out Co-pilot within the organisation and began our journey with the aim to become an AI-first institution. With AI we see significant potential to enhance and streamline our custody and post trade services.
Also, we made significant progress in our digitalisation journey as an important milestone this year, in response to clients’ demand: APIs for settlement fails monitoring and real-time securities holdings shall be rolled out in the second half of this year and in parallel we will be rolling-out a renewed version of our post trade client connectivity channel UBS KeyLink.
Maintaining our high-quality service to clients while successfully integrating Credit Suisse operations into UBS is undoubtedly a major achievement. To give you an idea of the magnitude, the migration encompassed: onboarding of 200+ third-party banks clients, triggering related repapering; moving over 50k ISINs and completing the vast majority of asset transfers within 9 months with the ambition to finalise the remaining transfers in the coming months.
How do you plan to build on this success going into the rest of the year and beyond?
The integration of Credit Suisse is not only a significant effort but also a great opportunity to advance key strategic initiatives at a faster pace. We plan to build on our current success by scaling what works well, embracing innovation, and staying relentlessly focused on delivering value.
This involves leveraging the enhancement of our services derived from the best of both worlds, such as additional services for broker-dealers, expanding into new geographies, and laying the groundwork for the future of our digital asset custody offering. In line with our top-of-the-house strategy, we are setting the basis for our future growth in APAC, where we see lots of potential. We have been present for a few years with 2 booking centers and were able to win additional mandates this year, while migrating over $100 billion assets.
We are also broadening our presence in Europe next year, thanks to a strategic cross-divisional initiative. This expansion of our offering aims to serve banks and other professional and institutional clients from our booking center in Frankfurt, offering the flexibility of contracting with our European legal entity whenever this might create operational benefits and or regulatory convenience for our clients.
In conclusion, we are undergoing significant transformation, are very positive about our ambitions, and remain focused on our strategy and our clients. We aspire to see the current efforts and energy reflected in an additional GC award next year.