The Swiss bank UBS reported a net profit of 1.165 billion Swiss francs ($1.25 billion) for the whole of 2017, weighed down by a writedown in the fourth quarter that related to the new U.S. tax overhaul.
The consensus from a Reuters poll was for a figure of 1.257 billion Swiss francs, below the 2016 number of 3.3 billion Swiss francs and below the 2015 figure of 6.2 billion Swiss francs.
The chairman of Swiss banking giant UBS said in an interview published Sunday that he does not consider the soaring cryptocurrency bitcoin as money and called for regulators to intervene.
"In my opinion, bitcoins are not money," Axel Weber, chairman of Swiss financial giant UBS, said in an interview to Swiss news agency NZZ am Sonntag on Sunday.
Just in time for the implementation of stringent new regulatory requirements, some of the largest banks in the world have revealed a pilot designed to simplify compliance using ethereum.
Banking giant UBS announced Monday it has united with Barclays, KBC, SIX and Thomson Reuters to advance the MiFID II data collection project. MiFID II is a revamped version of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which is intended to offer greater protection for investors. MiFID II officially comes into force Jan. 3, 2018.
Switzerland’s consumption indicator remained broadly unchanged in October but suggested that private spending is growing at a solid pace in the fourth quarter, the UBS investment bank said Wednesday. The indicator inched up to 1.54 points in October from revised 1.51 in September.
New passenger car registrations and domestic tourism improved in October. By contrast, the index of consumer confidence measured by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs stagnated. In October it was -2 points, virtually unchanged from the previous quarter’s -3.
A former associate director UBS Hong Kong was today sentenced to three-and-a-half years’ imprisonment at the District Court for accepting bribes of about HK$1.46 million for managing the investment portfolio of a client with the bank. Tu Bing, 40, was earlier found guilty of bribery.
The chief executive of UBS, Sergio Ermotti, says it is becoming "more and more unlikely" that the bank will move 1,000 staff from London after receiving "regulatory and political clarifications" around Brexit.
The Swiss bank has previously said that around a fifth of its 5,000-strong UK staff were involved in operations dependent on passporting rights that allow financial services to operate across the bloc.
UBS thinks cryptocurrencies are in a "speculative bubble." There are over 1,000 cryptocurrencies, bitcoin being the biggest by market capitalization, and many have seen huge rises in value over the past few years. Bitcoin for example is up over 470 percent year-to-date.
"We think the sharp rise in cryptocurrency valuations in recent months is a speculative bubble," UBS wrote in a white paper published last week.
The chief executive officers of Switzerland’s top firms take home almost double the median salaries of Europe’s 100 biggest companies, according to a study by consultants Willis Towers Watson.
The Eurotop 100 study, presented on Thursday, studied the direct remuneration – not including pension or bonuses – of the CEOs of the 100 most highly capitalised blue-chip companies in Europe.
