By Oliver Hirt
ZURICH (Reuters) -UBS’s know-how chief is assured that the vastly advanced integration of Credit score Suisse, bringing its former rival’s purchasers and knowledge onto its personal platforms, is “bang on the right track” after a profitable check run.
Chief Government Sergio Ermotti has beforehand flagged that IT integration is likely one of the largest dangers going through UBS because it embarks on the second, trickier part of merging with the fallen rival it acquired in an emergency rescue deal final 12 months.
Ermotti stated in Might that any delay to the IT integration would hit the Swiss banking big’s promised value financial savings.
UBS final month accomplished a check that concerned migrating a whole bunch of Credit score Suisse purchasers from Hong Kong and Singapore, UBS Chief Operations and Expertise Officer Mike Dargan instructed Reuters in an interview in Zurich.
“We put a few hundred purchasers of various complexities from Hong Kong and Singapore by a check case in September,” he stated.
“This went very effectively. The whole flooring was applauding. There have been tears.”
The financial institution will start migrating purchasers booked in Luxembourg and Hong Kong within the coming weeks, with Singapore barely later and different international locations following later in 2024 and subsequent 12 months. UBS expects emigrate 1.3 million purchasers general, Dargan stated.
“That is the most important migration of information as a part of an M&A transaction in monetary companies, if not the largest general,” he added. “Total, we’re bang on the right track when it comes to know-how integration.”
Traders have been happy with how the largest banking takeover for the reason that world monetary disaster is continuing. UBS shares have gained almost 56% in worth for the reason that takeover of Credit score Suisse was introduced in March 2023.
However the IT integration is fraught with dangers, given its complexity and the enormity of the shopper base and knowledge transfers.
Earlier banking offers have proven how exhausting integrations may be, with Deutsche Financial institution’s takeover of Postbank taking far longer than anticipated, with glitches locking prospects out of their accounts for weeks.
For Credit score Suisse, UBS is migrating 110 petabytes of information, with every petabyte equal to 500 billion pages of printed textual content, sufficient to fill 20 million giant submitting cupboards.
Credit score Suisse had about 3,000 functions, 100,000 servers and 16 knowledge centres. Thus far UBS has decommissioned roughly 560 functions, 13 petabytes of information and 40,000 servers, Dargan stated.
“We’re just about on the right track for functions and forward on servers,” he added.
Dargan, who’s liable for about 40,000 staff, stated the financial institution would scale back the variety of exterior contractors UBS makes use of in know-how and operations, enabling it to maintain nearly all of Credit score Suisse’s everlasting staff and elevate the proportion of inside know-how and operations employees to 85% from 60%.
UBS employed about 110,000 folks at mid-year, although media reviews have stated that complete headcount might fall to 90,000 as soon as integration is full in 2026.
