Yet another name from the UK's merchant-banking
past bites the dust. UBS is to ditch the Warburg name from its
investment bank as part of a rebranding that also heralds the
demise of all other extraneous suffixes.
Consigned alongside Warburg to the dustbin of financial history,
as of June 9 at least, are the divisions Capital, Global Asset
Management, Private Banking and PaineWebber, the US brokerage that
in 2000 became the most recent addition to the UBS stable.
Now all of them will simply carry the moniker "UBS".
Long-suffering employees must be hoping that this latest name
change will mark the end of what seems like a never-ending saga.
"I've had nine different business cards in 10 years here," says one
senior investment banker. "And that's without counting
promotions."
In the second half of the 1990s the investment bank's name
changed roughly once a year. Good-old SG Warburg gave way to SBC
Warburg in 1995. Two years later Dillon Read was suffixed after SBC
bought the US boutique. Then the prefix disappeared after SBC
merged with UBS in 1998, leaving the name as Warburg Dillon Read.
It then became UBS Warburg in early 2000.
One astute investment banker predicted the changes nearly 18
months ago. Walking out of the dining room after an in-house lunch
with Euromoney, the banker stopped, having spotted a slight change
in the decor: "They've moved Siegmund Warburg's portrait back here.
It used to be in the main hall. I bet they're getting ready to dump
his name from the firm."