UBS unveiled its new regional operations office in Biel, a city better known for its Rolex factory. The bank plans to house hundreds of staff in its brand new location.

Switzerland’s largest banks has three new regional operations centers in Switzerland and Biel is the latest to be unveiled. For the city, which is located about half an hour by train from the capital of Bern, the new center – dubbed Business Solutions Center (BSC) – came as a major boost.

The building close to the main station has plenty of work stations, with UBS having signed a contract for the lease of 7,700 square meters of office space. In April of 2019, the first 60 members of staff started working in the BSC and the bank expects to have about 100 based in Biel by the end of the year. The center however has space for 600 employees.

Gradual Build-Up

Sabine Keller-Busse, the chief operating officer at UBS Switzerland, expects the offices to fill up slowly over the years, as the bank moves diverse back-office tasks to the new center. The bank’s human resource division is looking for new staff and expects to move some of its existing staff to the center as well.

UBS will keep the number of people working in IT, operations and procurement steady for its Swiss division but plans to relocate them to the three BSCs. Biel is expected to take staff from Zurich, Basel, Bern, Geneva and Lausanne, where the bank also has significant numbers of staff.

Eleven Centers Worldwide

Asked whether the bank found its easy to relocate Zurich-based back-office staff to Biel, the bank said that the experience from the other two centers in Schaffhausen and Manno-Suglio had been positive ones, with an excellent atmosphere recorded in both places.

UBS now has some eleven services centers in Switzerland, Poland, India, China and the U.S., with 13,000 employees in total.The three centers in Switzerland have about 500 members of staff in Schaffhausen (opened in 2017), Manno-Suglio (2018) and now Biel (2019).