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UBS mulling a move to EU if financial services passporting rights are lost

UBS looks at Brexit consequences: Andrea Orcel, UBS president, said options other than London would need to be looked at if the UK loses financial services passporting rights when it leaves the EU
Nick Goodway
12 July 2016

One of London’s biggest investment banks, UBS, has said it was examining the blandishments of Paris and Frankfurt as options other than London if the UK loses financial services passporting rights when it leaves the EU.

“We would need to consider moving a number of our employees to a European Union country,” said Andrea Orcel, president of the investment bank.

“The French government, the German government, a number of governments are making, if I may call it this way, a case for people to move to their jurisdiction.”

UBS, led by chief executive Sergio Ermotti, employs just over 5400 people in London split across its investment bank, wealth management and asset management.

A spokesman declined to say how many could be affected if the investment bank moved its headquarters into an EU country.

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The bank already has branches in Paris and Frankfurt and so could move to one of those relatively easily to continue passporting to the other 27 countries in the Union.

Switzerland, UBS’s home, has no financial services passporting deal with the EU and the bank has used London for this purpose for investment banking and wealth.

It had already said ahead of the UK’s Brexit vote that it was looking at alternative headquarters to London.

Last year UBS chairman Axel Weber said he believed that the UK would be able to negotiate a deal giving it access to the EU’s single market for goods and services.

Orcel also said he believed the investment bank and the industry had reached a sensible size following thousands of job cuts since the global financial crisis. “We are exactly where we should be to face the environment we have, to face the regulation that we have,” he told Bloomberg.

He also warned that people should not be looking for big bonuses. He said: “I would not expect people to expect this year, even next year but certainly this year to be a bumper year. This year is going to be a tough year for everyone.”

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