In connection with the news early Friday that UBS has poached Andrea Orcel from Bank of America Merrill Lynch to become co-CEO of its investment bank alongside Carsten Kengeter, the Swiss firm also announced that Alex Wilmot-Sitwell will become chairman of the investment bank.
Wilmot-Sitwell is currently co-CEO at UBS in Asia-Pacific and his new appointment means that Chi-Won Yoon will once again become the sole CEO for the region.
The changes in Asia-Pacific will take effect on April 1 and come just 18 months after Wilmot-Sitwell was transferred to Asia to take on the co-CEO role alongside Yoon. His new appointment will see him return to a position at the top of the global investment bank as UBS’s most senior client relationship banker. To free up time for more client work, he will step down from the group executive board.
Sources note that Wilmot-Sitwell loves working with clients and is an absolute natural at the job. And having spent several years in more administrative senior management roles, he is ready to go back to doing what he is best at. That is not to say that he hasn’t done a good job managing the region together with Yoon, and in a press release issued early Friday morning, UBS group CEO Sergio Ermotti said that the bank has made “significant progress in this strategically important region” under the leadership of Wilmot-Sitwell and Yoon.
But clearly the reshuffle is intended to make the most of the bank’s resources and allow its most senior people to play to their key strengths. A guy like Wilmot-Sitwell “should be in a client-facing role”, one UBS insider said.
According to the UBS release, Wilmot-Sitwell will “specifically focus on ensuring a seamless delivery of [UBS’s] investment banking business to key clients around the world” and on developing the investment bank’s global client franchise.
Before he took on his current position, he had been co-CEO of UBS investment bank, which incorporates the investment banking business as well as equities and fixed-income sales and trading, since April 2009 together with Kengeter (the role now given to Andrea Orcel). Prior to that he was chairman and CEO of Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) for a short while, and between 2004 and 2008 he worked as joint global head of the investment banking department together with Rick Leaman.
In recognition of the importance of Asia — and the fact that many of the bank’s clients are based here — Wilmot-Sitwell will continue to be based in Hong Kong. He first moved here from London in November 2010 when he assumed the regional CEO job.
Chi-Won Yoon
As the sole CEO for Asia-Pacific, Yoon will continue to support the business divisions in managing growth, increasing collaboration and ensuring profitability in the region, UBS said. A markets guy with his roots in equities sales and trading, Yoon has worked at UBS since 1997 and has more than 25 years of industry experience. Prior to joining the investment banking industry in 1986 he was a rocket scientist and helped design the satellite communications network used in the US space shuttle programme.
He took over the role as CEO for Asia-Pacific in June 2009 when Rory Tapner left UBS after 25 years with the firm. In 2004 Yoon was appointed head of Asia equities and in 2008, his responsibilities were widened to include the whole of Asia-Pacific, i.e. Japan and Australia as well. In 2009 he was given the dual role as head of Asia-Pacific equities and fixed-income, currencies and commodities (FICC).
Meanwhile, new hire Andrea Orcel, who is currently executive chairman of Bank of America Merrill Lynch as well as president of emerging markets ex-Asia, will together with Kengeter be responsible for implementing UBS’s strategy of building a “client-focused, less capital-intensive and more globally competitive investment bank”, which was outlined at the bank’s investor day in November. Orcel will join UBS on July 1 and will also become a member of the group executive board.
His appointment means UBS is putting additional senior resources at the top of the investment bank following the $2.3 billion loss by a rogue trader that was uncovered in September last year. The scandal led to the resignation of group CEO Oswald Gruebel later that month and the appointment of Ermotti to succeed him in mid-November. At the time, Ermotti had been with UBS for just over six months and the hire of Orcel means the banks is giving a top leadership role to yet another person who is not tainted by the trading scandal.
Like Ermotti, Orcel is Italian and both bankers have a background with Merrill Lynch. Orcel joined Merrill Lynch in 1992 as part of the financial institutions division in Emea. Since then he has held a variety of positions, including global head of the financial institutions division, head of global origination, president of international banking and wealth management, and head of international corporate and investment banking.
The UBS release noted that when he assumed responsibility for global origination (which combines investment banking and capital markets) in 2007 he became in charge of establishing top-tier profitability, growing market share and diversifying the business from a financing-led model to a client-focused advisory model — experience that he should have a lot of use for at UBS. Orcel has previously also worked at Goldman Sachs and at the Boston Consulting Group.
