UBS = U Be Shite in Americas?
There has been a lot of chatter around UBS and the growth after Barclays takeover and CS merger however the business still stands to be below par in Americas. There are groups such as GIG, M&A, TMT, etc with ~75 people and yet generate revenue less than Tier 2 banks.
UBS is a strong platform but most of the deals come from cross border or co mandates. Not sure how often do I see UBS leading deals in Americas. Future outlook is definitely bearish given alot of the great people will be looking to leave given the uncertainty and instability. UBS shower growth in IB revenue but to be fair the growth is just natural as a result of a stronger market and the fact that the bank has grown MD count by 100% in the coverage areas.
Curious to hear peoples opinions as not sure UBS is a place you want to build your career in at the moment. There is just way too much uncertainty and the hype all comes from APAC and EMEA unfortunately.
UBS is the same as it was before top groups(LevFin/Sponsors) continue to chug along and have had marginal improvement. They are still good seats with very solid PC exits(a decent chunk of UMM/MF exits) and acceptable enough PE exits. I understand you are an intern so just commenting on what you have seen, internally UBS deal flow has marginally picked up but definitely not as much as expected. Tbf to the bank in terms of league tables in America, UBS doesn't do any O&G deals at all and that's been one of the bigger industries for YOY, if you are to exclude that UBS has in fact seen an uptick in deal activity in the Americas.
The M&A group at UBS continues to be(as it was previously) not a top group at the firm, and TMT/HC has improved but only in the sense of previous deal flow being literally 0 and now it having at least 1 or 2 deals in the pipelines. GIG still has done deals this year and continues to win some mandates, though remains not a top group. UBS FIG has genuinely been killing it and has decent FIG exits that might get better as that group has seen a noticeable increase in deal flow. The other groups at UBS remain completely useless, which is to be expected given where the senior hires were(CR has also seen some senior hires but I haven't seen them internally or externally win deals).
To your point, a lot of the deals are in fact cross border or co-mandates, and although those are fine deal experiences, not exactly ideal. Overall, it'd be foolish to say there hasn't been at least marginal improvement but very clear that the improvement has not been to the extent that management had initially hoped in the Americas, even if the improvement in EMEA + APAC has frankly been a significant overperformance(UBS is a t10 bank in deal flows this year last I checked on Bloomberg, a status that is essentially nearly completely driven by a huge uptick in revenue from APAC/EMEA).
To summarize, UBS remains a solid place to start your career if you are in their historically strong groups and remains a fine, but slightly improving place to start your career if you're not in one of their top groups. Again, this has been the case for years at this point and basically since post-GFC(for a decent bit GIG and TMT were also top groups, but that ended with the SVB laterals amongst the seniors). FIG is a group that might now become a top UBS group and has suddenly seen an actually noticeable uptick in mandates won and deals, but that's a fairly niche sub-vertical to where it'd still not be an overall top group for exits.
Dont forget UBS has been on record several times saying that they don’t have their eyes set on wholesale banking (IB). WM is much more up their alley.
Although UBS main focus is WM, it's not exactly right to say they don't have their eyes set on IB. Case in point : senior hiring from Barclays which they really had no point doing unless they actually wanted to grow their IB. Also case in point, are the following articles :
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/why-ubs-wants-to-be-the-no-6-invest…; - UBS has made even more senior hires in America since this article came out, pretty clear with the level of senior hires that IB in the Americas is viewed as a growth area.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/swiss-bank-ubs-targets-us-deals-s… - UBS wants to grow WM in America through M&A, which should help UBS IB as a lot of UBS deals are sourced through WM clients, at least per my experience.
Also wild to see all the comments be removed, didn't really get to see it : but once again goes to show how low morale is in some groups at the firm(I assume). Most ex-CS juniors remain extremely fearful and hateful(granted much less the case among CS seniors) and a lot of UBS juniors are pissed that their seniors and culture has been "ruined" by "hardo CS and Barclays hires".
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