UBS

Swiss financial body FINMA said on Tuesday it had discontinued its investigation into UBS Group in connection with Malaysia’s scandal-tainted 1MDB fund. "FINMA recently discontinued its investigation into UBS. FINMA found no systematic, serious misconduct, but sent the bank a written reprimand," the swiss watchdog wrote in a statement following its annual media conference.

Three cases remain unresolved, Finma added in a statement. A case against UBS was closed recently and the bank, Switzerland’s largest, was reprimanded with no further action to be taken, the watchdog said.

The two big banks are yet again trading neck to neck. Indeed, both their share prices have been oscillating slightly below the CHF 16 mark for more than two months (between 15 and 16 for UBS and 14 and 16 for Crédit Suisse). Crédit Suisse lags a bit following the sharp fall it saw in early 2016, yet its higher beta of 1.57 (1.07 for UBS) has enabled it to catch up most of this underperformance. We expect more ring-fencing between the two over the next few months.

UBS, the world’s biggest wealth manager, will impose a penalty charge on customers who park euros with the bank, a reaction to the negative interest rate environment in the euro zone.

The Swiss bank, the world’s largest wealth manager, will introduce from May an annual fee of 0.6% on accounts with more than €1 million ($1.1 mln). The charge will apply to total amounts held by individual customers and be calculated on a daily basis. It comes in response to the ultra-low or negative European Central Bank rates, in the wake of the financial crisis, which have eaten into banks’ margins. UBS currently imposes an individual deposit charge for large account balances held in Swiss francs by corporate, institutional and certain very wealthy clients, as it deals with negative interest rates charged by the Swiss National Bank.

UBS will go on trial in France for establishing a wide-ranging tax fraud scheme, legal sources said today. The swiss bank will be charged with illegal banking practices and dissimulating tax fraud, the sources said, adding UBS’s French subsidiary will also go on trial for complicity.

“UBS has made clear that the bank disagrees with the allegations, assumptions and legal interpretations being made,” the bank said in a statement. “We will continue to strongly defend ourselves and look forward to a fair proceeding.”

UBS has repeatedly warned it will move staff to the Continent in the wake of the EU referendum. Chairman Axel Weber claimed 1,500 jobs would shift from London to preserve its business on mainland Europe and that the two-year negotiation process for Brexit “simply would not work” for its relocation strategy.
“We cannot postpone decisions on how we run our European operations,” Weber said at a conference in Frankfurt on Wednesday. “As soon as we know definitely that Brexit will happen, you will see decision-making processes kick off in all financial institutions.”

UBS published its Annual Report 2016 providing detailed information, showing that it lowered the total pay for its chief executive Sergio Ermotti in 2016, a year in which the bank’s net profit was cut nearly in half compared with a year earlier.

Zurich-based UBS said on Friday that total compensation for CEO fell to 13.7 million Swiss francs ($13.5 million) in 2016 from 14.3 million francs a year earlier. Mr. Ermotti’s base salary remained unchanged at 2.5 million francs, according to a public filing, and he received a smaller bonus compared with 2015.
Overall, UBS decreased its 2016 bonus pool by 17% compared with the year before, to 2.9 billion francs.

JPMorgan, Microsoft, Intel, Accenture PLC and a large consortium of major players in tech and banking, including Credit Suisse, UBS, Bank of New York Mellon and Thomson Reuters, have joined hands to establish the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a new group dedicated to developing Ethereum into an enterprise-grade Blockchain platform.

The alliance connects Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, academics and technology suppliers with Ethereum subject matter experts to learn from and build upon Ethereum and to define standards for enterprise-grade implementations.

Swiss private consumption is set to grow robustly over the coming months as households’ economic and financial expectations have improved considerably, results of a survey by the UBS bank showed Wednesday.

The UBS consumption indicator rose from 1.38 to 1.43 points in January and continues to signal solid growth in private consumption. Swiss consumers view the economic and financial situation with considerably more optimism than in the last quarter. New car registrations and domestic tourism have, however, fallen compared with the previous January. Economists had forecast a score of 1.5.