Western Europe’s best bank for wealth management this year is UBS. In Euromoney’s private banking and wealth management survey for 2022 the Swiss bank held off a stern challenge from JPMorgan to be named once again as the leading provider in the region.
The survey is based on the responses of 2,058 senior private bankers, investment managers and relationship managers around the world. It is a peer review in a market where banks cannot cover all segments of the wealthy in every country with every service and so have to recommend their clients to other banks.
UBS is rated the best overall in western Europe and tops the rankings for key client segments including high net-worth and ultra-high net-worth, as well as for key services such as environmental, social and governance, sustainable investing, philanthropy and family office services.
Its success is all the more remarkable because the bank has recently been focusing more on the bigger US wealth market: in January, it acquired Wealthfront, a US robo-adviser targeting millennial and generation-Z clients, and the faster growing markets of Asia.
In Europe, it has been trimming costs, selling its business in Austria and preparing to exit Spain. But it is still present in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain, Sweden, the UK and Jersey, as well as Switzerland.
The franchise continues to benefit from the strong reputation of its chief investment office, which provides clients with guidance on market-moving events through live streams and alerts. These are now being pushed out via an app as part of the My Way offering.
UBS My Way is a mandate where clients and their advisers create personalized portfolios that the bank’s portfolio managers then monitor and adjust.
It is a clever hybrid that combines low-touch digital efficiency with the feel of a high-touch personal service and discretionary fees. UBS is also building on its ability to offer private clients access to the kind of private market investments normally reserved for institutional investors, and it has also been increasing efforts to cover entrepreneurs in association with the investment bank.
Investors globally are clearly concerned about the personal and economic impacts of one of the largest humanitarian crises in decades
Iqbal Khan
European clients will be looking for advice on the fallout from the war in Ukraine, as UBS’s own recent investor sentiment survey shows.
“Investors globally are clearly concerned about the personal and economic impacts of one of the largest humanitarian crises in decades,” says Iqbal Khan, president of UBS Europe, Middle East, and Africa and co-president of UBS Global Wealth Management, adding that “the long-term economic implications of the war in Ukraine are difficult to assess.”
