Article: UBS Quietly Hollowing Out Its Onshore Workforce and Rebuilding the Bank in India

UBS has spent three years describing its Credit Suisse integration in terms of overlapping entities, technology decommissioning and organizational simplification. The bank says it has already extracted $12.6 billion of gross savings against the companies’ combined 2022 cost base.

Less clearly explained is how much of the new operating model depends on shifting work to India.

UBS’s own disclosures show a sustained expansion. Its Indian workforce passed 3,000 in 2018. By 2020, it had reached approximately 6,800, with the bank saying that nearly 1,000 Hyderabad employees had been “strategically insourced or hired” for finance and operations supporting group-wide run-the-bank processes.

The Indian Business Solutions Centers exceeded 12,500 people in 2021. Following the Credit Suisse acquisition, UBS consolidated the two companies’ Indian service entities into a 24,000-person organization—about 16% of the bank’s global headcount at the time.

The expansion is continuing. In February, UBS announced a new Hyderabad facility and plans to hire another 2,000 professionals, potentially rising to 3,000, primarily across technology, artificial intelligence and operations. The additions would roughly double the bank’s workforce in the city.

That announcement came as UBS prepared to eliminate approximately 3,000 positions in Switzerland. UBS declined to connect the two developments, and people familiar with the matter told Reuters there was no direct link.

That distinction may be technically accurate. It does not erase the broader geographic shift.

UBS’s internal FTE count declined from 103,177 at the end of 2025 to 99,085 by June 2026, a reduction of more than 4,000 positions in six months. At the same time, the bank is creating thousands of positions in one of the lowest-cost major financial-services labor markets.

Nor is the Indian platform limited to traditional back-office processing. UBS says its teams there support technology, finance, operations, legal, compliance, risk, HR and procurement. Its recruiting materials also reference wealth management, investment banking, brokerage and research.

The structure is technically insourcing because many of these employees work for UBS’s captive Indian subsidiaries. Economically, however, it can produce many of the same benefits as outsourcing: work previously performed by highly compensated employees or external vendors in New York, London and Zurich can be conducted inside UBS at substantially lower cost.

What UBS has not disclosed is a detailed geographic bridge behind its integration savings:

• How many high-cost-market positions were eliminated, left unfilled or transferred as Indian capacity expanded?
• How much of the $12.6 billion in savings reflects labor-location arbitrage?
• How has the location of investment-banking, research, technology and control-function work changed since 2018?
• What portion of the new Hyderabad hiring replaces contractors or work previously performed elsewhere?
• Why do different UBS webpages describe its Indian workforce as more than 15,000, more than 20,000 and 24,000? The figures may use different reporting perimeters, but UBS does not clearly reconcile them.

The available evidence does not establish a one-for-one transfer of Swiss or American jobs to India. The 2025 increase also includes Credit Suisse employees inherited through the acquisition.

It does establish that UBS built a rapidly growing Indian delivery platform before the merger, materially expanded it through the transaction and is investing in additional capacity while total and Swiss employment decline.

For investors, the question is how much more cost UBS can remove through this model. For employees, the implication is less comfortable: the role may not be formally “outsourced,” but an increasing share of the work underneath it can still migrate to Hyderabad or Pune.

The H-1B debate may therefore be focused on the wrong mechanism. UBS does not necessarily need to import lower-cost labor into its principal financial centers. Its emerging operating model allows the bank to export an expanding share of the work instead.