Numbers don’t tell you everything, but sometimes they shout pretty loud. Apac profits for UBS Global Wealth Management grew from $560 million in 2019 to $1.1 billion in 2020; a near doubling of profitability in the middle of a pandemic. Along the way invested assets in the region passed the $500 billion mark for the first time, hitting $560 billion by the end of the year, with $25 billion of net new money.
Numbers like these have no equal in the industry. They were also mightily important to UBS globally, representing about 30% of total and about 70% of incremental profits in 2020.
How has it done this? There’s no question that in difficult times, scale creates scale. Clients trusted UBS and rewarded it with a ton of business. Much of the profitability increase was transactional, as people traded their way through volatility and sought to both position themselves defensively but ready for emerging opportunities.