AfE 2024
UniCredit’s headquarters – Italy’s tallest building – tower over the Milan skyline in a blunt celebration of growth. Given that the bank’s share price has tripled in the two years to June 2024, the 32-story building could be seen as a reflection of the ambitions of its chief executive, Andrea Orcel.
Orcel, who was head of UBS’s investment bank for most of the 2010s, now presides over a refocused and balance sheet-light approach at UniCredit. Thanks in part to this and to higher interest rates, UniCredit’s return on tangible equity was 16.6% last year, compared with 7.3% when Orcel arrived in 2021, albeit on a slightly lower capital ratio. This has been a remarkable turnaround and Orcel is Euromoney’s banker of the year.
Before his time at UBS, Orcel was an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, advising on a wave of bank M&A deals that culminated in the ill-fated Royal Bank of Scotland-led takeover of ABN Amro in 2007.
That
