UBS pledges US$400 billion in Swiss loans after Credit Suisse

UBS Group will continue to provide about US$414 billion of credit to its home market as a sign of the bank’s commitment to Switzerland, country head Sabine Keller-Busse said.

“We are putting money where our mouth is,” she said on Wednesday (Sep 11) at UBS’s Best of Switzerland conference. The bank will deploy its balance sheet in a “much smarter” way than Credit Suisse did, she said.

UBS’ Swiss business officially merged with its Credit Suisse counterpart on July 1, more than a year after the emergency takeover was announced. 

The merging of the units enables the Swiss business to move on to trickier integration stages, such as client migration, which is scheduled to take place in 2025. For some more complex clients, a manual on-boarding process has already started, said Keller-Busse. 

On the Swiss loan book, Keller-Busse said UBS would address “excess capital intensity” in a “more holistic way,” which for some clients would mean higher prices, she said.

Switzerland is a key business for the bank, with UBS deploying around 30 per cent of its capital in the region. 

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Last month, UBS posted higher than expected profit in the second quarter, putting it on track for pre-merger levels of profitability and helping to bolster the bank’s efforts to repurchase some US$1 billion in shares this year. BLOOMBERG