Swiss bank UBS AG hopes its investment bank can mirror the turnaround of its Americas wealth management unit by cutting some businesses to focus on areas where it is top- tier, its financial boss said on Tuesday.
Tom Naratil, who was chief financial officer and chief risk officer of Wealth Management Americas (WMA) from 2009 until he took over the group CFO job this year, said the investment bank can learn from the recent success of the US brokerage.
"As we look at the investment bank strategy going forward, there is a very important lesson in what we did in WMA," Naratil told Reuters in an interview.
"It was a strategy where we said we are going to focus in a business line that everybody said was about scale which is a pretty similar discussion to what some would say about investment banking today."
UBS, hit last month by a trading scandal just as it was starting to recover from massive losses on subprime assets in the financial crisis, is working on a major overhaul of its troubled investment bank ahead of an investor day on November 17.
Naratil said he worked closely on strategy with Wealth Management Americas CEO Robert McCann, a former Merrill Lynch executive hired two years ago to lead the US unit's turnaround.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.