UBS, the world's biggest private bank, is considering rolling out its online investment platform worldwide after a successful trial in Britain, a senior manager of its wealth management business said. SmartWealth, which launched in Britain this year, provides automated financial advice for customers looking to invest upward of pound 15,000.
"We built a fully automated digital wealth management advisor. Scaling this up will be essential," the Swiss bank's chief operating officer for wealth management, Dirk Klee, told Reuters. UBS hopes SmartWealth will help expand its customer base from millionaires and billionaires to the so-called mass affluent, those with assets of 100,000-2 million pounds to invest.
SmartWealth could be expanded on the back of the bank's newly unified IT platform which excludes only the bank's US private banking business, which is run out of a separate American division. "We are in the process of evaluating if we will roll it out globally through the platform," Klee said, in the interview this week.
IT PLATFORM REAPS BIG SAVINGS
UBS last year said it would spend around 1 billion Swiss francs ($1 billion) to standardise its IT platform across the wealth management business, helping to lower costs and facilitate the launch of digital features like SmartWealth.
The bank has not provided a specific savings target. The new IT structure, known as One Wealth Management Platform, is now raking in savings for the wealth management business in the markets where it has been launched.
"The synergies are immense," Klee said. "Wherever we implement it, you can see that the operating costs go down in a double-digit percentage amount. Everything we invest in, in the future, will be more efficient and cost less." The wealth management division, which comes under new management in January after the departure of its current boss , manages more than 1 trillion francs in assets and had 3.9 billion francs in nine-month operating expenses.
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