UBS Investment Bank
It will have escaped few people’s notice that UBS is taking pole position in FX and continues to cement its franchise. It is the winner of FX House of the Year for the second year running. UBS is recognised as a world leader in terms of e-commerce but the judges recognised that its business offering goes way beyond technological prowess. In The Banker’s FX survey in March 2003, UBS achieved an unprecedented level of client satisfaction across products and geographies.
Martin Wiedmann, managing director and global head of FX distribution for UBS, says the bank’s continued success is due to multiple factors that it has built on in the past few years. “First, we have recognised the increasingly divergent needs of our clients and developed value-added, segment-specific FX services to address those needs. Second, we have been able to leverage our trading, technology and e-commerce infrastructure to increase efficiency dramatically – both for us and our clients.”
Three out of four of UBS’s client transactions are now conducted online, both empowering customers and freeing-up the bank’s time for relationship building and better client service. “As a result we have dramatically increased our client volumes and market share without the need for added headcount,” says Mr Wiedmann.
“We have also grown partnerships with banks as end-users, offering them a unique FX service built around superior liquidity and increased product breadth, allowing them to focus their resources on their own client relationships. Finally, UBS has had a clear FX business strategy, and we have been committed to implementing it across all layers of the organisation, from front to back. This true partnership across sales, trading, services, logistics and facilitation functions has allowed UBS to reach our aggressive goals in foreign exchange.”
