Your Evening Briefing: UBS Plans to Slash Half of Credit Suisse

Three months after UBS agreed to buy Credit Suisse in a government-brokered rescue—the coup de grâce for its teetering Swiss rival and the European chapter of this spring’s banking fiascoes—the full human price of the forced union has now become clear. UBS is said to be planning to terminate more than half of Credit Suisse’s 45,000 employees. It’s a dramatic drop of the anvil on a financial sector in which Wall Street banks such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs previously announced thousands of their own firings.

UBS, whose combined workforce jumped to about 120,000 when the deal closed, has said it aims to save some $6 billion in staff costs in the coming years. Credit Suisse employees in London, New York and parts of Asia are expected to suffer the worst of the dismissals. Staffers have been told to expect three rounds of terminations this year, with the first expected by the end of July and two more tentatively planned for September and October. UBS signaled early in the takeover that it intended to drastically cut back at Credit Suisse’s loss-making investment bank, which was the source of the $5.5 billion disaster tied to the Archegos Capital Management scandal in 2021. Shares of UBS gained as much as 2% in US trading on Tuesday. As for UBS Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti, he says the integration with Credit Suisse is going “very well.”