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Lots of people in the industry will tell you they always wanted to be an investment banker. Few mean it like Andrea Orcel does. His thesis at university was on investment banks and what they do for their clients.

UBS was named Best global bank and Bank of America Merrill Lynch won the Best global investment bank prize at Euromoney’s Awards for Excellence Dinner in London.

The clear definition of a radical strategy distinguishes the Swiss bank from most of its peers. The successful execution of that strategy makes it Euromoney’s Bank of the Year.

Less than three years ago UBS was written off as one of the ultimate victims of the financial crisis. The bold decisions taken then by a new chief executive and his management team make it today a bank that others seek to emulate. Sergio Ermotti pinned UBS’s future to the core of its leading global wealth management business. Now the business is starting to look more than the sum of its parts.

UBS announces that Alex Friedman, global chief investment officer, will be leaving the firm.

Asia and emerging markets provide the bulk of net new assets for UBS in the first quarter.

Dismayed by the media coverage of the FX fixing controversy as the new Li[e]bor, which suggests the fixing practice of FX dealers, exposed to principal risk for large orders, constitutes an open-and-shut case of outright manipulation and is a new controversy? Well, continue reading.

UBS rewrites rules on how to charge Swiss clients fees; cross-border banking woes to hit smaller banks.

Change is afoot in the private-banking industry as UBS launches a ‘middle-way’ approach to charging clients fees for advice, Euromoney can reveal.

Friedman joined UBS in March 2011, from his former role as CFO for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Anyway, back to Switzerland and the Swiss banks. Things do appear to be stabilizing at UBS. Sergio Ermotti was appointed chief executive in late 2011 and a year later he installed the long-term Merrill Lynch banker Andrea Orcel as head of UBS’s investment bank. UBS underwent an epiphany and scaled its fixed-income division back drastically. The new focus was to be wealth management and corporate finance, which would hopefully flourish untainted by scandals in the fixed-income division. However, in the third quarter of 2013, UBS suffered a setback. The bank announced that it would delay, by at least a year, its aim to reach a 15% group return-on-equity target. This retreat was due to an unexpected demand from the Swiss regulator, Finma, requiring UBS to set aside more capital against "known and unknown litigation".

Banks still dependent on ECB funding; recent run-up in shares might have gone too far.

The bank made most of the right calls last year to achieve a positive performance for 90% of client portfolios.

Firm seen as ‘catalyst for consolidation’; Fierce competition driving down fees

Most of us carry scars from the excesses of the debt-fuelled casino days. The acceleration, crash and burn of the 2005-09 period led to lost jobs, dwindling pension pots and puny returns on cash savings. But for some the great financial recession has cast few shadows.

The annual report for 2012 released by UBS in March demonstrated that its management continues to flounder, while offering perverse hope that the disaster-prone bank might be stumbling towards a sustainable business model.

Strong wealth management focus; Main push in Brazil and Mexico

As chief executive of UBS Wealth management since 2009, and head of what is now clearly the group’s most important business, Jürg Zeltner, looking more youthful than a 25-year veteran of the bank has any right to, speaks to Euromoney as one of the most powerful figures on the UBS group executive board. He is pleased with his division’s re-emergence as an active asset manager, its return to the top of the Euromoney private banking rankings and with the success of its signature discretionary management products for high-net-worth clients. But he is restless to grow and improve the business in various ways, by developing its product mix, revenue streams and client profile.

Two characteristics set UBS apart from other private banks, says Bob McCann, head of UBS Wealth Management Americas. “First, we are truly global. Other banks claim to be, but if you look at their revenue streams they are not balanced internationally, or they are pulling out of international businesses to focus domestically. And second, wealth management is a core business accounting for over 50% of UBS’s total revenues.

The private banking industry has had to modernize as never before to keep pace with the global needs of clients, new regulation and rebuild trust. Change has not come easy, but for those wealth managers that have blended global capability with product expertise in local markets, they continue to stand out from the crowd.

In its home market, UBS has aroused plenty of popular antipathy as an embarrassment to the country for its frequent stumbles in the past five years. But as a business, it is doing reasonably well.

Investors and regulators will like its latest plan to pay part of bankers’ compensation in a new form of contingent convertible.

By cutting back its investment bank sharply, UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti has laid down a challenge to competitors. It now seems that the private bankers wielding power at the top of UBS want to keep fair chunks of the investment bank. Has Ermotti found the keys to a resurgent UBS?

Regulators and shareholders are channelling their concerns over banks’ slow progress in shifting to new and sustainable business models to a new cadre of activist chairmen. Often experienced in the industry, independent of executive management and with strong personalities, these chairmen are increasing the pressure on bank CEOs to abandon unrealistic ambitions and reshape their banks to a new world. Expect more ructions ahead.

For some reason, the phrase “Denial is not a river in Egypt” resounds in my mind.

The decision by UBS to perform elective surgery on its own investment bank can be partly attributed to pressure from bank-stock analysts. It might be premature to hail the dawning of a new age of the analysts, but a group who had become best known for astonishingly inaccurate stock forecasts and fawning attitudes to bank CEOs has at least begun to redeem itself.

Long-suffering shareholders of UBS can take comfort that JPMorgan’s bank-stock analyst Kian Abouhossein feels their pain. Abouhossein, who is consistently at or near the top of industry rankings of bank analysts, has been an owner of UBS shares while he has touted UBS as his number-one bank-stock pick in recent years and produced price forecasts well above the prevailing market value.

Creates challenge to other banks; Capital-lite bank suited to low growth

UBS plans to strengthen its FX and precious metals business in the wake of October’s restructuring, which saw it shrink its investment bank and withdraw from a number of fixed-income businesses.