UBS

UBS Chairman and former Bundesbank President Axel Weber said on Wednesday bitcoin does not fulfill some of the most important functions of currency, the latest senior banker to express skepticism about the cryptocurrency.

"I get often asked why I’m so skeptical about bitcoin, it probably comes from my background as a central banker," Weber said at a conference organized by the Swiss Finance Institute. Axel Weber previously served as head of the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank.

UBS France’s new 4.5 billion euros wealth management division, La Maison de Gestion, is looking at hiring new staff to grow the business, the company said on Tuesday.

The Swiss bank’s La Maison de Gestion arm was formed from a deal struck in December last year when UBS France agreed to buy the local private banking business of Italy’s Banca Leonardo. The new division was formally launched on Tuesday. With the transaction in France, UBS thus has acquired the access to the circle of super rich individuals and families.

Swiss bank UBS could shed almost 30,000 workers in the years ahead due to technological advances in the banking industry, Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti said in a magazine interview.

Ermotti told Bloomberg Markets that “process-oriented” companies see scope to cut workforces in half through new technology but he believed the true number for banks was around half that.

Northern Trust, an asset manager established in Chicago in 1889, has closed its acquisition of UBS Asset Management’s fund administration servicing units in Luxembourg and Switzerland, further underpinning its growth strategy for Continental Europe.

The acquisition positions Northern Trust as a leading administrator by assets in Switzerland and a top 10 asset servicing provider in Luxembourg. Northern Trust welcomes more than 200 new employees and establishes a new European office in Basel, Switzerland, as a result of the acquisition.

Swiss prosecutors are trying to figure out why someone apparently attempted to flush tens of thousands of euros down the toilet at a Geneva branch of UBS Group AG.

The first 500-euro ($597) bills were discovered several months ago in a bathroom close to a bank vault containing hundreds of safe deposit boxes, according to a report in Tribune de Geneve confirmed by the city prosecutor’s office. A few days later, more banknotes turned up in toilets at three nearby restaurants, requiring thousands of francs in plumbing repairs to unclog the pipes.

The UBS banking team has released its annual survey on factual inaccuracies in Australian mortgage applications, and the results aren’t pretty.

The latest detailed survey of more than 900 people who took out a home loan in 2017 has found that only 67 per cent responded that their mortgage was "completely factual and accurate", down from 72 per cent of 2016 borrowers.

Equities and private equity drove a turnaround in family office investment performance this past year, as revealed in the newly-released Global Family Office Report 2017 (GFO).

The composite global portfolio of family offices (FOs) returned a healthy 7% in 2016, compared with 2015’s disappointing 0.3%. Growth was driven by equities and private equities, which represent a combined 47% of family office portfolio. Meanwhile, performance of hedge funds and real estate was more subdued, and their popularity among FOs declined accordingly.

UBS is mulling over shifting its trading headquarters from London to Frankfurt inside the European Union (EU), post Brexit, as Bloomberg report.

The Swiss firm’s investment bank employs about 4,800 bankers globally and could move 250 or more jobs out of London to Frankfurt and other European locations, two of the people briefed on the deliberations said, asking not to be identified as the talks are private.