"I want to improve the client-segment mix. We are, if anything, too weighted towards ultra-high-net-worth clients," he tells Euromoney. These very wealthiest and most demanding customers contribute something like 40% of the group’s SFr1.6 trillion of client assets under management.
Operating almost like institutions rather than as individuals, they have considerable buying power. They tend to pay brokerage commissions rather than asset management fees and, as UBS has stumbled from the sub-prime crisis, to rogue trader scandals and now Libor manipulation, they have been flighty. The first customers to leave the bank when its troubles began were institutional; even the most long-standing clients drew the lesson to distribute their business more widely among wealth managers. High-net-worth clients proved to be more sticky.
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| Jürg Zeltner, chief executive of UBS Wealth Management |
The take-up by those high-net-worth clients of UBS’s discretionary management offering has filled Zeltner with confidence in the group’s capability as an asset manager. This has even been evident in Asia, where the received wisdom is that wealthy clients want either brokerage or leverage, but not asset management. "In fact our highest growth rates for wealth management are in Asia, where I think new ideas of wealth development and diversification are taking hold."
