Strategy
UBS Private Wealth Unit To Open More Offices In US - Report
With a difficult 2008 behind it, UBS’s New York private wealth management unit is moving ahead with its programme of opening more US offices, says John Straus, the head of the unit and the chairman of its UBS Private Bank, according to an interview with the publication Financial Planning.
This year the unit has opened offices in
Louisville and
Dallas and plans to open its twelfth in
Washington, Mr Straus said in a recent interview with the
publication; setting up shop in
Florida is also a possibility, he said.
"We have the same aggressive build-out plan we set out many years ago," he said.
His upbeat comments contrast with UBS's recent problems in its legal fight with US tax authorities, a move that has led the Swiss-listed wealth management giant to stop offering offshore banking services to wealthy US clients.
Mr Straus' unit opened a pilot private wealth management office in 2006 added more in 2007. In an interview last year, Craig Walling, the chief executive of UBS Private Bank, said he wanted to double the unit's market share of assets invested by wealthy individuals and families within two years.
The unit still wants to double its market share, but the
landscape has changed, Mr Straus said. For a start,, the stock
market's woes and the recession have diminished the ranks of the
very wealthy, he said. A year ago UBS said that there were
140,000
US households with more than $10 million of assets under
management, and that it expected that total to triple over the
coming decade.
Mr Straus says the market downturn could hamper that growth, though the goals for the private wealth management business remain reachable, in part because the unit has been on a hiring tear, doubling its number of client-facing financial professionals over the past year, to 280.
UBS has had success recruiting investment bank veterans by emphasizing a long-term commitment to wealth management in these turbulent times, Mr Straus said.
Mr Straus said the fact that UBS was not alone in marketing the securities did not much matter to clients who had bought them. "With clients that had them, initially it was very challenging for us. If they are just a client of UBS, they don't care whether it's an industrywide problem."
