Good morning, everybody. Welcome to day three of the conference here in Zurich, and I'm delighted to be kicking off day three by hosting a local name, UBS. I'm joined on stage here by Iqbal Khan and Rob Karofsky. Iqbal and Rob are both co-presidents of the Global Wealth Management division. In addition to these roles, Iqbal is president of UBS Asia Pacific and Rob is president of UBS Americas. That means that jointly they oversee the largest division within UBS, and also having individual responsibility for two of the largest markets. Needless to say, they both sit on the Group Executive Board. Iqbal and Rob, thanks so much for making the journey to come here and share your perspectives.
Pleasure.
Thank you.
At this point, I would normally do a quick run-through of the CV, both of these two gentlemen have very extensive CVs that would take up a lot of our time. They're there on the website if you want to have a look. I think let's get into this conversation and hopefully have a few minutes towards the end for audience Q&A. This session is also being webcast, warm welcome to everybody joining us remotely today. Clearly uncertainty on the macro front of things, I guess that uncertainty is elevated with the war in the Middle East, elevated commodity prices, uncertainty around the growth outlook, yet markets, as we were discussing earlier, have held up. As you talk to clients and hear from your advisors, how has behavior and activity levels differed?
Sure. Maybe I'll take that one. I think globally, I would say our clients remain pretty engaged, but clearly cautious, given everything you mentioned, and you could probably mention a few more things that give people cause. I would say overall, activity remains fairly healthy. As you say, the markets are incredibly resilient. I think we're just off of all-time highs here. If you think about the overall resiliency, probably a little bit of a surprise, it's fairly narrow. I read the other day when we made an all-time high, I think there were around 20 or 30 stocks that were trading at all-time highs. You see the mega cap tech, the hyperscalers, semiconductors continue to lead the way. I think that investors generally are looking for that to broaden out. We do see quite a bit of dispersion.
Volatility on stocks remain higher than the overall index. Clearly markets and investors to a large degree are pricing in some sort of resolution in the Middle East. I think there's expectations that this could be bumpy, and we've seen some bumps along the road. We continue to guide our clients to be diversified, which is incredibly important as we sit here near all-time highs, opportunities to protect downside through structured products. We haven't seen a real knee-jerk reaction in terms of asset allocation. From our perspective, our clients continue to value the trust and advice. If you look at our mandates, UBS Manage continues to be the beneficiary of that. If you look at our first quarter, CHF 38 billion of net new fee-generating assets, I believe we had record mandate penetration.
Despite all of the uncertainty, as I said at the outset, clients remain engaged, cautious, and activity remains fairly healthy.
Okay. Maybe turning to Asia Pacific, you had really strong flows in the first quarter, very strong profitability in the region as well. What's driving the momentum in that region? How sustainable is that, and how do you think about the competitive landscape?
Absolutely. Asia feels very different to just a couple of years ago, if we think about it. As you know, I moved out to Asia a couple of years ago with my family, and I can actually personally see the difference in sentiment and momentum, and there are a few reasons for that. China tech has been a big driver. The Hong Kong IPO market and ECM market has been a big driver. If you look at Taiwan and Korea around the whole AI hardware topic, as much as Japan and India, although India slowed down a bit from a capital markets perspective, but overall, some of these economies and businesses have been doing really well. With that backdrop, I think overall client sentiment and business sentiment has turned positive, and there's clearly momentum in Asia.
If we look at UBS, we've been in Asia for more than 60 years, in mainland China for more than 35 years. We're by far number one in wealth management in Asia, specifically in the upper high net worth and ultra high space, which continues to grow. We bank every second of three billionaires out in the region. We have a strong research and investment banking and markets franchise, so there's that whole one UBS ecosystem that fundamentally is also driving momentum and continues to drive momentum in the region.
Super clear. Maybe turning to U.S. wealth management, a key area of focus for investors. Last year, you outlined various strategic initiatives to improve profitability here. How are those progressing?
Yeah, I'd say they're progressing well. We kicked off really a three-year period of investment important for us to grow profitability for the benefit of our advisors and clients. The U.S. is really important to the overall Global Wealth Management business that the two of us are responsible for. The U.S. remains close to 50% of revenues, close to 50% of assets, and it was important for us to inject significantly more operating leverage in the business. If you look at what we have been pursuing, increasing net interest income, I think through lending growth, I think we have eight consecutive quarters of positive lending growth. We received the final approval for our nationally chartered bank earlier this year, which is part of our more strategic solution. That's progressing really well.
We look forward to launching that in the second half of 2027 as we're building up the technology to support the products. We do have significant gearing towards ultra high net worth, so delivering more of the bank into our ultra high net worth clients is important. We've hired specialists in pods across the country. That is, I would say, going quite well. When you look at our advisors and clients that are engaged with our fully activated pods, they're growing twice as fast as the rest of the organization. We continue to build out our advisory platform, Total Wealth, which is going well. Alternatives, which is important. Technology investment is really across the piece, but certainly leveraging artificial intelligence as well.
Better balancing the business with a focus not just in the U.S. but globally on high net worth is important, where we do have a substantial business, but continuing to invest in that is really important as well. Margins, it's been constructive so far. Obviously, in the first quarter, around 14%. We're confident around 15% for full year. We've messaged 18% by 2028. We believe that there's a positive runway here. We remain very focused on flows as well, and that continues to be something that the entirety of the platform is really focused on and contributing to overall Global Wealth flows greater than CHF 125 billion for this year. We remain confident around that as well. A lot of work, but we're really pleased with the progress, the momentum we have, and expect that to continue.
I mentioned at the beginning, you've got the regional responsibility hat, but then you have joint responsibility for the overall division. Maybe for both of you, but Iqbal, I'll start with you. Where do you see the benefit of that global diversified business model, especially if you think about how that compares to some of your peers?
I think let's start with the numbers. Let's look at 2025. If you look at 2025 profit before tax by region, we literally had the same profit before tax in every region. We don't talk about the fact that we're truly globally diversified. We're literally globally diversified. The numbers show it, which also shows how relevant our respective franchises are in every region. We're at scale in most of our regions, right? As Rob was mentioning, we're improving our business footprint in the U.S. Outside the U.S., we have scale across every region. If you think about the benefits, think about CIO, managed platform, generally the solutions platform, you can create a lot of synergies around that and also best practices sharing. The same is true if you think about technology stack, right?
As you go through the entire value chain, there are real benefits there from a UBS perspective. Now, why is this relevant for clients? If you look at the world, and the world is becoming multipolar. I think it's quite obvious that clients, and this is a theme that has started over the last couple of years, where diversification becomes very relevant for clients, specifically in the client segments that we play significantly in. Who else is better placed to help those global investment needs, global multi-shoring needs, and connect a franchise the way we can, just based on the fact that we're a scaled global and truly global franchise?
Yeah. I think similarly, when you look across the U.S., being the one truly Global Wealth manager is really important to our brand. It's exciting. I think that the collaboration we have between the investment bank, which I was responsible for six years, and seeing that really started with Iqbal and myself, in terms of figuring out how we could deliver more of the bank to our most sophisticated clients. That continues to move from strength to strength. It's something that we also continue to invest in with dedicated capabilities and products and services. What we've done with the alternatives business more recently, that type of collaboration, I think is really unique. We describe it as our secret sauce.
I think having responsibility for wealth, both of us, but also being responsible for the regions as well, I think has allowed us to really accelerate that type of collaboration for the benefit of our clients. That's something that's only going to continue to become more and more important and relevant as the world continues to become more and more complex, and really staying close to clients, whether they're wealth clients, whether they're institutional clients, whether they're corporate clients. I think that is certainly one of the differentiating aspects of our model that we continue to lean into and are able to help accelerate with our current responsibilities.
Clearly there's a big debate on capital right now for UBS. Sergio and Todd have spent a lot of time on the earnings calls and meetings, et cetera, trying to flesh that out for everybody. Within that, there's a question around competitiveness versus your global peer group. I'd be fascinated to hear from both of your perspectives, how do you think about this competitiveness question element of the capital debate when you think about how your businesses operate in your regions?
Well, as you said, Colm, Sergio, and Todd have spoken quite a bit about this. With respect to views and concerns, there's nothing more for the two of us to add other than it's not going to change the type of firm that we are. We are, as we're largely done with the integration, really proud of our diversified business model, our global and our regional footprint. I think from a competitive perspective, allows us to really play to our advantages in terms of being large, having scale, having differentiated content, differentiated advice that's truly global, differentiated solutions for our clients. We continue to invest in technology to be innovative, and we do that in a safe and sound way. I think that we thought we were the European global champion.
I think after the acquisition and largely complete integration of Credit Suisse, that's who we are today. I think we have momentum. Our clients are excited about the firm that we've become, and as we stand today, we're able to be quite competitive, leveraging our strengths.
Anything you wanted to add on?
I think Rob covered really very well.
On AI, there is clearly a lot of noise around all the positivity that AI can bring, but there's also a debate around the potential negative impact on wealth managers in particular, from how AI may change the service side of the business, et cetera. Just maybe talk a little bit about how you're seeing or how you're deploying AI within your business, but also where you see the risks to the business model from AI.
Yeah. I think we see it as largely positive. As you're aware, our business is heavily geared towards ultra high net worth and high net worth, and the value they place and the trusted partnership that they have with our advisors, I think is unique and unprecedented. That being said, from the way that this can improve our operational resilience, add more productivity into the franchise, create a better client experience for all of our clients, is something that's really important. As a firm, we're heavily engaged with artificial intelligence and investing. We have nine large transversals across all aspects of business divisions and group functions that are ongoing and progressing well. Again, it speaks to what I just mentioned, improving operational resilience, improving the end-to-end life cycle experience for our clients as well.
When you think about wealth, one of the things that we're really focused on is really improving the straight-through processing aspects of the business, improving the end-to-end client life cycle. We're creating and have created, and this started in the U.S., but is being exported globally, is creating AI-driven client insights to help our financial advisors cover clients more efficiently. I believe in 2025, we generated CHF 20 million of these insights, which has important implications for the business and for the flows that we talk about. This is something that we'll continue to invest in. We're fully in terms of artificial intelligence. Clearly, I believe there are various studies that talk about expected CapEx around the data centers and the whole data center ecosystem of around CHF 5 trillion by 2030.
I think that's important, and it's clearly been an important driver of the markets and some of the narrowness that we talked about earlier. I think that when you talk about the risks, this needs to broaden out, and it needs to show the whole value accretion across the entire economy.
The next phase that people are going to be looking to see, and it's certainly something that we keep an eye on as well.
Super clear.
Maybe just to add to that. I think as Rob was covering this around capacity productivity. If you think about the underlying value proposition that UBS has and claims at scale globally in wealth management is you get onboarded into the UBS ecosystem, and if you're eligible from a regulatory perspective to have access to specific content, solutions, services, you can get access to it. Historically, this entire value chain has been driven manually, expert-based as much as semi-automated. Let me rephrase. Not level of scale, but the level of marginal productivity you can gain by releasing capacity, which you can use to serve clients better.
Your client advisor is spending more time with clients, specialists spending more time with clients. That on its own has a significant productivity or capacity gain, helping us grow our business as much as reducing capacity where and when we may not be able to grow. That really is the most exciting piece, at least from our perspective, around AI when we look at the wealth management business specifically.
I think, that leads on to my next question. The business itself or UBS as a group, has traditionally been very focused, as you mentioned, in ultra high net worth. Some of your peers, particularly in Asia Pac, are leaning in more to a sort of lower level of the wealth pyramid. Some of those technologies you talked about maybe enable service at scale, or easier service at scale. Is there any appetite on your side to maybe lean in slightly more on the high net worth side or slightly move down that pyramid from where you sit today?
Already today, we have a significant high-net-worth franchise. I mean, the foundation of our overall wealth management franchise, if you go back in history, has always been the high-net-worth franchise. Off of the back of that, in collaboration with the investment bank, in collaboration with Asset Management, we've been actually able to grow our ultra-high business, which clearly over time created operational scale. Right? The reason for ultra-high growing has also been the fact that this has been a part of the client segment or overall client target addressable market that has been growing the fastest over the last decade. Equally, I think we were able to bring a very deep and broad offering to these clients at scale globally, to all the points that Rob also made before.
I think when you talk about some of our peers in Asia, the question is always what do you count as high net worth? What is the definition of high net worth? I think everybody defines high net worth a little bit differently. Let's assume for a second that there is a high net worth group of clients out there, which is a significant part of the overall wealth pyramid. If you think about the lower high net worth, historically for any franchise, any business, the question of cost to serve, coming back to the point I was making before around the value chain, has been to some extent a challenge to grow in that segment.
Absolutely for us, the high net worth segment and also the lower high net worth, not affluent, but lower high net worth segment, is clearly a priority and is one that we're looking to grow in and have ambitions around that. We do believe that technology and specifically AI and what we can do in terms of the value chain and the capacity that we can create, can be very well used to grow. We're not looking to compete with the active traders out there. We're not here to compete with the new incumbents that are coming in, which is mainly affluent, right, maybe very low high net worth. We want to differentiate with what differentiates us, which is wealth management services, premier wealth management services, specifically around wealth planning, Wealth Way, and portfolio-level service and advice.
Yeah.
If you think about one of our managed solutions, which has scaled quite nicely, which is MyWay , which is a modularized setup of our managed platform, which allows clients to choose between 120, 140 modules. Now, if you think about that's a great solution for this client segment.
It's diversified. It allows you to delegate, yet still be involved. It creates engagement with the client. You're doing that today mainly through the advisor channel. With the support of AI and technology, not only does that create capacity in how you actually get that done, but you can actually open up an entirely new client segment that we've probably not grown in over the last couple of years as we're looking to grow in the future.
On the topic of growth, I guess, private credit, you must be one of the largest distributors of alternative investment products. Where are you seeing demand patterns here, in particular on private credit, given all the focus on credit standards, lending constraints, et cetera, gating? Just where are you seeing that whole ecosystem shake out with regards to the business?
I mean, we've continued to see demand for alternatives also in Q1, although shifting within the whole sort of universe of alternatives. We clearly saw more demand for hedge funds and macro strats and, sorry, multi-strats. As much as continued demand for private equity. There has been less demand for private credit. Overall, I think Todd covered this as part of our results. Overall exposure versus invested assets is somewhere between 5% and 6%.
Private credit is less than 1% versus invested assets. Rob was talking about UGA, so Unified Global Alternatives, which is a combined business between asset management and wealth management, where if you think about the size and scale of that overall business, we're a significant aggregated LP, if you like, globally.
Yeah.
Why is this relevant? This is relevant because it gives us better purchasing power.
Yeah
if you like, thanks to our clients, to actually give them better terms, more differentiated solutions, more differentiated products, but across the entire multi-channel, so for institutional wholesale as much as for wealth management clients.
Super clear.
Yeah, I would just say, listen, the space has grown quickly.
Yeah.
Companies staying private for longer. You see the whole universe versus private and public. It remains a really important space. I think what's happening in private credit is there's always some indigestion when things go up quickly, but I think overall it's going to continue to be a very important space and important for us as well.
Super clear. My last question before I turn to the audience to see if we have any here. I guess, for both of you, stepping back, what excites you most about your business and the prospects for what you're able to achieve over the next, let's say, call it 12-18 months? What are the two or three key strategic priorities and, frankly, how should we and the analyst and the investor community, how should we go about measuring the success of that?
Do you want to?
Sure. After a three-year integration/migration phase, where we've created significant scale, if I just think about Asia and how complementary that combination has been and how that's driving business, is really great to see and that it's worked out so successfully. From a people to client to tech migration integration, we can now really focus on growth. Right? I think that's quite exciting that as we're going into a different phase for UBS as a whole, and definitely also for wealth management and in our own regional businesses that we oversee as regional presidents, that definitely is very exciting. The second piece around it is the underlying transformation. This is more of a wealth management specific point. The underlying transformation that is ahead of us in wealth management with the help of AI.
I personally have started to use AI much more, started to create my own agents. If you start thinking about what is possible, and I go back to this curation of a value chain and an investment platform. Think about in the past, we have three million solutions on our platform. Right? In the past, we used to think about these three million solutions, should it be less? Is it driving complexity? Tomorrow, the question will be why not have 10 million solutions? You all of a sudden create capacity that allows you to drive the business in a very different way. People look at AI as potentially something that can disrupt wealth management, and probably there are segments where you have to think very actively about the disruption.
I think from our position of coming in from upper high net worth and ultra-high, I see this more as an opportunity. Away from we're done with integration, we're currently focused on growth, and then this transformation, which probably is one of the more unprecedented transformations that we've seen for a long time in wealth management. It should be good for us as UBS.
Super clear.
Yeah. We talked about this a little earlier, but very excited about our increased focus on high net worth, leveraging AI, investing in feeder channels, I think is going to be really exciting for our future growth. I think the investments that we're making in the U.S. to really improve profitability by adding operating leverage, again, for the benefit of our advisors and clients is really exciting. Launching our nationally chartered bank is something that is going to be really important for the business. Connecting clients globally, being the Global Wealth Management firm in a world that is complex and is likely to remain complex for the foreseeable future, I think is something that Iqbal and I are excited about.
Great. At this point, I'll see if we have any questions in the room for either Rob or Iqbal. Dirk at the front. If you could just wait for the microphone, Dirk, and then we'll. It's here on the front, the second row.
These lights are very bright.
Yeah.
Yeah, they are.
Yeah.
Just so I recognize people.
Yeah. Good morning. Dirk Becker from Allianz Global Investors. I have a question for the U.S. business, please. Do you think you can close the margin gap to your peers? You tried to change the compensation scheme for your advisors, which didn't go well. Can you talk a little bit about the attrition that you've seen and how this will impact the net new money flows in the coming quarters, please?
Sure. First, I would say, we're focused on narrowing the gap. We have an international business that is best in class in terms of cost income ratio and improving the margins in the U.S. business, and narrowing the gap has really important implications for continued margin improvement to our global business. I would tell you that. We clearly made some structural changes to the business, which I think are having important implications for the margins where we do have momentum, and that is important. We remain very focused on retaining advisors, recruiting advisors. We have the best advisors, we believe, in the industry. Very productive. Continue to grow. We continue to help them grow. They're excited about the investments that we're making in the business. We had positive sequential growth in flows from the fourth quarter of last year to the first quarter of this year.
Our focus on flows continues to be very important for the business. I would answer your question slightly differently. I think the changes we're making are having positive implications for the business. We continue to invest. We're at the beginning of a three-year journey. We're almost halfway through. We have momentum, and I'm confident that we're going to continue to improve the business and, importantly, contribute to a best-in-class Global Wealth Management business.
Any other questions in the room? Okay, just perhaps one final one from me. I can see our clock ticking down. I think one of the interesting questions, you both represent a Swiss bank in the U.S., a Swiss bank in Asia. What's the value of being Swiss, right, and not being local per se? Where do you see tangible advantages in your discussions with clients in the two regions, and how important is the sort of Swissness to the identity of UBS?
Sure. Primarily, we're a global institution.
Yeah.
Right? As for the comments that we made, and what we've seen is the benefit of us being global, having scale in every region, becoming more credible, right? More credible and enhancing our footprint in the U.S. works really well from a value proposition perspective. Right? The U.S. is still the deepest and largest wealth pool, but also capital market, right? If you look at the 10 largest by market cap equity markets, the U.S. is still on the top. Asia has surpassed a number of European stock exchanges, if you like, or stock markets. I think at the end of the day, what clients are looking to get from us is stability, safety, reliability, a strong platform, a globally connected platform, one that they can rely on.
The way we look at this is, now imagine that exact platform that's driving momentum and growth as we've been able to demonstrate over the last quarters. I think we had, what, seven or eight sequential 20% PBT percentage growth quarters? Now think what we can do with that franchise if we do everything that Rob and I have been talking about, including AI.
Yeah
That entire value chain. I think at the end of the day, what is going to matter to clients is service, quality of service, reliability, sustainability, and then at the end of the day, also getting what they want at economies of scale. I think that's what we've been working on.
I don't think I could answer it any better than that.
Well, it's a great note on which to end. Again, Iqbal, Rob, thank you so much for coming here and sharing your perspective.
Pleasure.
Thank you.