About

Daniel Morales has worked at Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services firm, UBS, since May 2006, joining as senior legal counsel, overseeing group transactions, governance and disclosure. Since then he has assumed a number of senior legal positions within the bank. Morales joined UBS in 2007 at a very critical time for the financial industry, soon before the peak of the financial crisis, and in the years that followed he worked closely with the senior management of UBS on many of the bank’s most important initiatives revolving around capital market projects, transactions and contingency planning. ‘During that time I gained very valuable insights into large scale crisis management, including interacting with regulators on those matters as well as in negotiations with strategic investors’, says Morales. Following the crisis, in 2011, a highlight of his career was to manage corporate structural changes relating to the bank’s strategic initiatives as it was positioning itself in the new regulatory environment. In this untested environment Morales was able to learn a lot about providing strategic legal analysis and decision support to senior management on legal entity structural alternatives. ‘This put me in the position to assume a leadership role in the legal work surrounding the creation of a new group holding company structure and the carve-out of the bank’s retail, corporate and wealth management business in Switzerland’, explains Morales. He was appointed general counsel for UBS’s Swiss business in 2015, a role he describes as ‘a major career step and highlight’, where he was able to build on his previously gained experience and managerial exposure as adviser to the business with the new regulatory environment. He was well positioned in this role to demonstrate his commitment for a strongly integrated legal team in the region, to improve cross-divisional collaboration and drive talent development for all employees. In order to effectively perform his regional general counsel role which includes oversight of more than 200 lawyers in Switzerland, he has formed a new legal management structure which has seen him implement a number of initiatives to develop team spirit and collaboration. Amongst these he has actively supported diversity in his team and introduced “meet the group general counsel” roundtable events to provide a platform for discussion of cross-divisional topics. Most notably he has been behind the successful launch of UBS AG’s new Swiss subsidiary in 2015, which represented an important milestone in the reorganisation of the UBS legal structure by transferring the Retail and Corporate business as well as the wealth management business booked in Switzerland from UBS to UBS Switzerland transferring some 2.7 million client relationships and more than CHF 300bn in assets and liabilities to the new unit.