UBS has whittled down a once-swashbuckling unit of innovators for wealthy clients into a skeleton team, finews.com has learned. The move raises questions over the Swiss bank’s appetite for reinvention in its flagship business.

The team saw themselves as mavericks and enjoyed special treatment at UBS’ flagship $2.3 trillion asset private bank. A group of thirteen «innovators» decamped from the Swiss bank’s headquarters in Zurich’s financial district. The ambition was to «shape the future of UBS» by hatching and testing a series of half-baked ideas.

UBS is vulnerable to more nimble and tech-focused banks, fintechs, and wealth management providers – not to mention tech giants like Amazon, Google, Alibaba, or Tencent. Eventually, the bank felt, some lab ideas would be mature enough to be fed into the bank’s wealth management «supertanker».  

Merger Prompts Rethink

The group garnered attention for lending a glamor factor to the traditionally more staid business of wealth management. They avatarized UBS’ chief economist Daniel Kalt, for example, and joined up with Amazon’s Alexa tool to pipe financial advice into households.

Everything changed last year following the merger of UBS’ U.S. brokerage with its wider private banking arm, according to five people familiar with the «lab» and who spoke to finews.com anonymously. UBS began telegraphing to the roughly dozen employees that it could slow developments because the wealth management unit wouldn’t immediately roll them out.

«Follow, Not Lead»

The downbeat message – which one person involved interpreted as a «we'll follow, not lead» concession by UBS – prompted several of the «lab» bankers to head for the doors. None of the «lab» staff, including head Martin Meyer, were managing directors – and that was part of the point.

The group saw themselves as a key impetus for the wealth unit, but didn’t hew to the traditional banking hierarchy. Marc Michel left at the end of last year to become Bank Linth’s innovation chief; Jan Laessig is leaving to devote more time to a cultural start-up and a coaching career; and Matthias Koller took a tech research job at Japanese drug firm Takeda.

Management Disinterest

By August 2018 UBS offloaded Smartwealth, a U.K. robo-adviser, which hit staff morale hard. Michel, Laessig, Koller, and others saw the writing on the wall as UBS signaled its waning appetite for novel ideas from the lab, according to several people familiar with the team. The three declined to speak to finews.com

«Global wealth management seemed more occupied with itself following the merger, and seemed disinterested in what we were doing,» one former lab staffer told finews.com.