UBS Names New CEO

The financial services company UBS (NYSE:UBS)  in a statement said today that the interim chief executive officer for the Swiss Bank, Sergio P. Ermotti will be heading the institution on a permanent basis from now onwards and he will be taking charge of strategic restructuring. Serigo P. Ermotti was appointed as the interim chief since September.

The new chairman for UBS will be Axel A. Weber, the former chief of the German central bank who wil take over charge early in the next year which will be a year earlier than earlier planned. According to UBS, the company has sped up the process of leadership change in order to accelerate the implementation of latest investment banking strategy. UBS will be presenting it to its investors in New York on Thursday. The advanced change of leadership will allow the company to go ahead with restructuring which otherwise would be hard to do with an interim chief executive officer and an outgoing chairman.

Mr. Serigo P. Ermotti is a Swiss national joined the institution as a member of UBS management board in charge of European operations in the month of April this year and he had been considered as the potential candidate for the position of the chief executive officer and he id take up charge as the interim CEO after Oswald J. Grubel  has to step down from the position tendering his resignation following the loss of $2.3 billion suffered by the bank in a rogue trading scandal reported at the London investment banking division of UBS.

The current chairman of the bank Kaspar Villiger in a statement said that the changes in the bank’s management structure will bring the much needed stability as well as clarity to UBS and it will allow the bank to deal with various economic and regulatory challenges it is currently facing. He also said that the decision to appoint Mr. Ermotti as the permanent chief executive has been made after conducting an intensive evaluation of various internal as well as external candidates.

The shares of UBS fell by 2.9 percent in Zurich trading earlier today.

Kweku M. Adoboli, the former trader with UBS about to charges of false accounting and fraud is scheduled to appear in a London Court next week.

As a part of the new strategy developed by Grubel and Carsten Kengeter, the head of investment banking unit will include smaller and less expensive operations while focusing more on the wealth management business.

Post Written By: Ed Liston Ed Liston is a senior contributing editor at TheStockMarketWatch.com. An active market watcher and investor, Ed guides an independent team of experienced analysts and writes for multiple stock trader publications. He is widely quoted in various financial publications on the Internet. When Ed is not writing about stocks, investing in stocks, talking about stocks, or otherwise doing something stock related, he likes to go sailing and fishing in his yacht.