Awards for Excellence 2016
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Swiss bank UBS continues to be the biggest and strongest name in the wealth-management industry, but it scoops the Asia award not just for scale but for its demonstrable resilience and a model tuned to Asian entrepreneurial needs. Asia-Pacific wealth management head Edmund Koh likes to compare UBS to stainless steel: long-lasting, resilient, and nothing really marks it. The last bit hasn’t always been true at a group level, but in private wealth you can see his point: it has remained one of the businesses clients are not only loyal to but tend to gravitate towards when times are tough.
The clearest evidence of this came in the first quarter of 2016, a miserable time for markets and therefore for transaction business within the division, yet marked by SFr15.5 billion ($16 billion) of net new money worldwide – of which more than half, SFr8.8 billion, came from Asia, marking an annualized growth rate in the continent of 12.9%. Revenue was down over the same period, but this apparent contradiction tells us that even if clients are wary of doing much with their money in this environment, they’re happy to trust the funds to UBS until clearer direction arrives.