Awards for Excellence 2016
A firm that looks likely to buck the downward trend among European investment banks on the home continent is UBS. The Swiss bank has continued to recruit in areas crucial to its growth in its corporate client solutions division over the past year. These included M&A, leveraged finance, the UK, as well as sector bankers – building on its long-standing capacity in areas such as equity capital markets and financial-institutions, even if it was slightly behind Barclays for the overall investment banking award this year.
On the markets side, however, a restructured and revived business at UBS is already showing results good enough to win it our best bank for markets accolade. It has shifted to an agency model in fixed income and developed its technological capacity through UBS Neo, its cross-asset platform integrating equities, foreign exchange and fixed income research with access to pricing and trade execution.
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Globally, UBS’s investor client services division saw revenues rise by 16% in 2015, thanks to higher revenues in equities, foreign exchange, rates and credit. Perhaps most strikingly, it rose to first place in western Europe in Euromoney’s 2016 foreign exchange survey, with a market share of 9.5%, surpassing all the other European and American banks, including Deutsche Bank – a firm whose lead, especially in Europe, once seemed invincible.
UBS’s equities trading franchise also retains its strength in Europe (a market-leading share in 2015 of 9.8% in equities trading, according to Greenwich Associates). It also topped Institutional Investor’s research survey for Europe in 2015 and has continued to develop its research offering with products such as Question Bank, Evidence Lab and its Q-Series reports.
