Lecturers include Daniel L. Shapiro, founder and director of the Harvard International Negotiation Program, who will teach about relationship management; and Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School, and Alexander B. van Putten from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who focus on intrapreneurial leadership, or behaving like an entrepreneur within a large organization.
“It’s about changing the mindset,” Tanner said. “Currently the organization is very much compliance-driven, and rightly so because we’ve done a lot of mistakes in the past and we have to make sure that from a compliance perspective we fulfill all the standards. But within that framework I still must act as an entrepreneur.”
The program, which costs UBS about 25,000 francs per participant, also brings advisers closer to wealth-management executives, such as Zeltner, or William Kennedy, who runs the investment products and services unit. The unit, with about 2,000 people, is responsible for stocking the shelves with 4,000 to 5,000 products to match CIO views and provide support to client advisers on topics such as wealth planning.
Last year Kennedy, 42, who comes from a small dairy and horse farm in Ireland that he goes back to about once a month, helped create an automated tool that checks all clients’ portfolios overnight for deviations from saved risk profiles and UBS views. The functionality, which delivers an e-mail to advisers every morning with proposed corrections, is being rolled out in Switzerland and will be offered to customers in Europe and emerging markets later this year and in the Asia- Pacific region at the beginning of 2014, Kennedy said.
The tool is at the heart of UBS Advice. Figuring out how to make it work became clear in a discussion with a colleague about tools already being used for select clients, Kennedy said.
“We were clear that clients in this market environment wanted to have their hands on the steering wheel and were willing to pay for good advice,” he said.
Red-Flagged
Customers who switch to the flat-fee contract, which will oblige client advisers to alert them to any portfolio issues within a week of being red-flagged, will have to pay a minimum of 2,000 francs to 3,125 francs a year, depending on their risk appetite. The fees range from 0.8 percent to 1.25 percent for clients with assets of less than 500,000 francs and get smaller for those with higher assets.
The offering may be of interest to about half of UBS advisory clients, Kennedy said. It also would fulfill regulatory efforts to improve transparency about how advisers are compensated and reduce incentives for selling inappropriate investment products.
“My guess is, in three to five years, most customers with the bank will be under a contractual framework of one form or another, and that means they’ll be paying for advice on assets or for management of those assets,” Kennedy said.