UBS may lay off 100 private bankers in Singapore

Dept heads tell staff to brace themselves as current climate require cuts: sources

(SINGAPORE) UBS Singapore will lay off up to 100 private bankers by the end of the month, sources say.

Department heads have already told staff to brace themselves as some cuts have to be expected given the current climate, one UBS banker told BT.

The layoffs could touch 4 per cent but the number won’t be more than 100, the banker said. UBS Singapore employs 2,400 people.

‘Asia Pacific remains a strategic priority for UBS, and a region in which the group will continue to invest,’ said a UBS spokeswoman.

‘Like any organisation, UBS continually reviews its strategic needs and resources the businesses according to the environment and its outlook,’ she said.

Reuters yesterday said UBS Singapore laid off a team of six private bankers who were managing wealth for Turkish clients.

The team was managing clients’ assets worth between US$200 million and US$300 million and was hired from Swiss rival Credit Suisse two years ago, a source briefed on the situation told Reuters.

A second source said the firm has no plans to exit wealth management for Turkish clients despite the removal of the team in Singapore, which was done as part of a group restructuring.

The latest wave of retrenchments of private bankers at UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, comes after it laid off less than 100 investment bankers from its Singapore office.

In February, after posting a record loss, the bank said it would lay off some 2,000 investment bankers globally by mid-2009, to reduce their strength on its rolls to 15,000. That exercise has been largely completed. UBS posted a 20.9 billion Swiss franc (S$28.1 billion) loss for 2008 and said it remains ‘extremely cautious’ about the outlook for this year.

The 2008 loss is the biggest in Switzerland’s history. UBS has reported more than US$50 billion in writedowns and losses since the beginning of the financial crisis, forcing it to raise more than US$32 billion in capital from investors, including the Swiss government, and cut 11,000 jobs.

Singapore is one of the least affected by the group’s global reduction in headcount, the UBS banker said. Staff cuts last year and to date were minimal at a very low single-digit percentage in Singapore, she added.

Singapore is a wealth management hub for UBS and is the South Asian headquarters for investment banking.

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