ZURICH—Ten times over the past year, UBS AG Chief Executive Oswald Grübel has been called upon to speak personally with wealthy clients who were spooked by the Swiss bank’s deep troubles and threatening to taking their millions elsewhere.
ZURICH—Ten times over the past year, UBS AG Chief Executive Oswald Grübel has been called upon to speak personally with wealthy clients who were spooked by the Swiss bank’s deep troubles and threatening to taking their millions elsewhere.
Mr. Grübel, a 66-year-old German who came out of retirement from rival Credit Suisse Group to revive UBS last year, talked each one of the clients through UBS’s financial situation and sketched out his turnaround plan. All 10 ended up staying, according to Mr. Grübel.
Such hustling by a CEO is a sign of how aggressively UBS, long the world’s largest private bank, is working to regain its stature. Badly damaged by twin crises—an embarrassing U.S. tax-evasion investigation and soured bets on home mortgages—UBS has suffered an outflow of 231 billion Swiss francs ($220 billion) from its wealth-management unit since January 2008, as clients and bankers defected. The private bank now has 1.7 trillion francs under management.
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