Words matter. These are the best Sergio Ermotti Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
While government clearly plays the major role in fighting poverty through policies on things such as education, tax, and trade, business creates the wealth that matters.
When you start to get shareholders, clients, employees, rating agencies, and everybody converging, and then your competitors bad-mouth you, you know you did the right thing.
Today’s investors want to see a positive impact on society and the environment as well as solid financial returns.
People should never take things for granted.
If I have to tell you what was and is my mission, I think UBS can be the Apple or IBM of the banking industry: companies that went from being admired to severe difficulties and to being back stronger than before.
Every bank has to find its own DNA.
Growth is what solves most of the big economic and social problems: poverty, government deficits, quality of life, rising healthcare and retirement costs.
As a Swiss-Italian who has always worked for foreign banks, there was clearly an element of pride going back to my roots and working for the biggest bank in my country.
I’m totally convinced that the battleground of banking is not the front office. The battleground is the back end.
We believe existing currencies may move into becoming more of a crypto-currency.
Everything is always feasible if you run a corporate finance exercise: you can always try to come out with a justification on how things could work. But the real issue is to say how do you translate that into practice.
When you look at billionaires, many of them share one characteristic: They were not born billionaires.
Usually, you measure appetite of investors by their ability or willingness to take a bit of leverage on their positions.
Wealth management businesses are capital light businesses.
Impact investment is an important business driver, and more importantly, it is a business driver because clients want it.
Philanthropic funding can play a vital role in testing and stimulating innovation that, when proven, can be implemented at scale by business or government.
Many businesses in an investment bank, not only at UBS, are structurally a loss leader, so they don’t pay for the cost of capital.
I don’t think that the financial services industry and that banking in particular are any different than any other part of the economy, any other industry outside banking.
In 1987, Merrill Lynch asked me to open a Swiss capital markets operation. I was 27. In hindsight, I was lucky enough to start a business from scratch. And I mean from zero – no offices, even, just a space with walls between different areas. We decided to tear down the walls.
If we call ourselves the preeminent wealth management firm globally, then it would be impossible not to be a strong player in the biggest market in the world, the Americas.
We have to have a business model that can be a sustainable and acceptable one to both regulators and the other stakeholders, clients, and investors.
There’s no understandable reason why the financial services industry has not developed a more comprehensive sharing of the value chain.
