UBS grabs Hawaii team from Citi; cuts team in Asia

FWR Staff

25 March 2009

Swiss bank's moves tell a tale of simultaneous expansion and retrenchment. Last month UBS' U.S. wealth-management arm lifted a Honolulu-based team of brokers out of Smith Barney, the retail-brokerage unit of Citigroup last month.

Marienne McClure and Matthew Megorden joined UBS' as reports to the Swiss bank's Honolulu branch manager Sean Satterfield. The team managed $268 million in client assets when it was with Smith Barney.

McClure was a fifteen-year veteran of Smith Barney; Megorden worked there for more than a dozen years, according to FINRA records.

Smith Barney is on its way into a joint venture with the private-client division of Morgan Stanley. In recent weeks, its corporate parent's share price has been as much as 95% off its late-2007 level.

Farther over

UBS, which just reached an agreement to sell as many as 55 branches with $15 billion in assets under management to St. Louis-based Stifel Nicolaus, says its plans to get out of markets losing market share and ramp up -- taking advantage of dislocation in the brokerage industry -- in markets where its gaining ground.

Overseas, UBS has laid off a six-member, Singapore-based team that worked with wealthy Turkish clients, according to a report by Reuters. The team was recruited from Credit Suisse about two years ago in the thick of a bidding war among U.S. and European wealth managers for local talent in Asian markets like Singapore and Hong Kong.

But UBS says the team's demise doesn't mean it's pulling out of Turkey's high-net-worth market.

"Like any organization, UBS continually reviews its strategic needs and resources the businesses according to the environment and its outlook," a UBS spokeswoman told Reuters, while declining to comment on the layoff of the Turkish group specifically. "Asia Pacific remains a strategic priority for UBS, and a region in which the group will continue to invest."

Over the past year and a half UBS has lost tens of billions of dollars to bad bets in U.S. residential-mortgage-backed assets, while a dispute with authorities in the U.S. and other jurisdictions over its clients' use of Swiss-based bank accounts to evade taxes has set in motion reforms likely to decrease some of the utility and cachet of Swiss private-banking for offshore clients. -FWR

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