The charts suggesting UBS might need more Morgan Stanley bankers in America
As we observed last month, UBS's array of ex-Barclays ex-Lehman bankers don't seem to have moved mountains much in its US investment banking business, where the Swiss bank has plunged in the league tables and now appears to have a business a fraction of its former size.
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Four years ago, the combined entity of UBS and Credit Suisse ranked fifth in the Americas for investment banking revenue share. Now it's nowhere to be seen in the top 20 and the London Stock Exchange Group says it has a market share of less than 1%.
What happened? UBS's US investment bank has never been quite the same since the end of the COVID boom and the acquisition of Credit Suisse in 2023. 2023 was also the year in which UBS hired all its senior bankers from Barclays. It doesn't have much to show for that. It seems the leveraged finance business has been keeping things afloat, but Marc Warm, the head of lev fin, left for Barclays in May.
UBS is trying to make amends. When it announced its first quarter results the bank said it's investing in the Americas and claimed to be adding market share. It's hired various US bankers, including - most recently - Taylor Henricks from Morgan Stanley as head of M&A in the Americas and Peter Toal from Barclays as head of leveraged and debt capital markets to replace Warm. Reuters reported that Henricks is there to help expand UBS's investment bank in the Americas; maybe more Morgan Stanley hires will follow.
UBS has also taken the curious step of combining its global M&A and sponsors advisory unit into a single group, while letting none of its many US sponsors bankers go. The chart below shows global sponsors revenues at the Swiss bank over the past six years. The trajectory is not unfamiliar.
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