Focus on: Global Team Delivering

Solutions in a Dynamic World

A constantly evolving organism

‘Just as living creatures are more than the sum of their bones, tendons, and ligaments, there is more to a legal in-house team than its structure and framework. Every member is part of its brain, organs, and muscles, fuelling the function with creativity, know-how, power, and stamina. Just as a living being, our legal team keeps changing, growing, and evolving.’

Our in-house legal team is guided by UBS’s purpose: ‘reimagining the power of investing; connecting people for a better world.’ Hard factors such as regulatory and business requirements are important, but a myriad of soft factors including entrepreneurial mindset, out-of-the -box thinking, and everlasting willingness for flexibility, allowed us to constantly evolve as essential part of the company.

UBS, the largest truly global wealth manager, and a global systemically relevant bank headquartered in Switzerland, is subject to a complex mix of Swiss and international regulations. The bank is regulated and supervised by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority and by numerous other authorities around the world.

Legal UBS Switzerland – connecting and collaborating globally

‘To return to the metaphor of the team as a living organism: the big picture is your brain’s ‘what’ and ‘why’ but the ‘who’ and ‘how’ is your organs and muscles setting your conclusion and response into action.’

Led by Ueli Studer, the Swiss team focuses on people and collaboration. The past two years proved this focus to be key. In the pandemic crisis, we had to adopt new ways of communication to interact effectively with all stakeholders. Having supported the roll-out of remote working systems, our legal team took a role of further preparing the bank to meet relevant legal requirements – confidentiality, use of data, virtual assets, validity of contracts with e-signature – to continue digitalise banking business.

In response to escalating Russia-Ukraine conflict, the legal in-house team established cross-divisional working-groups including outside counsel to implement sanctions to the humanitarian crisis. Focusing on people and how they collaborate in such unprecedented times has developed us into a stronger and happier team while constantly providing essential legal advice to strengthen the global ecosystem of UBS.