UBS's recruiting website dances with forced Credit Suisse marriage and field leadership cuts

UBS, in the midst of a blockbuster $3.3 billion takeover of rival Credit Suisse, has long sought to hire the world's most lucrative wealth managers. Part of that goal revolves around a digital tool launched last fall that's being deployed as the merger of the two Swiss giants raises questions about potential job cuts and higher expenses.

UBS quietly debuted a website called Financial Advisor Experience, or FA(x), last September to offer prospective recruits answers to common questions about joining the global bank. The company hasn't formally announced the site or pushed out marketing campaigns around it.

Wealth advisors at competitors who visit the website can click around three primary areas, "Join," "Grow" and "Retire." The tabs reflect the UBS's strategy of appealing to advisors by advertising some of its compensation structuring, culture, expectations and benefits upfront. But the site doesn't spill the full or final beans: Ultimately, any advisor who joins the bank has a transition deal custom structured for that advisor or team, David Larado, UBS' head of advisor recruiting and retention, said in an interview.

The website "addresses the transparency topic of the recruits' journey, that we believe no other firm really offers at this stage," he said.

Pressured by Swiss regulators worried about global financial contagion on the heels of three U.S. bank collapses this month, UBS reluctantly agreed March 19 to buy its Swiss peer. Credit Suisse had said before the arranged marriage that it was already in the process of cutting 9,000 jobs to lower costs. 

The two banks are global titans of wealth management for the ultrarich and powerful, with banking traditions whose origins began in the Middle Ages. But the forced merger may exert cost pressures on UBS's recruiting ambitions in the U.S. as many jobs and roles in the two banks overlap and UBS will inherit baggage from Credit Suisse, though some $17 billion of the latter's riskiest bonds will be written off. 

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Digital tools over human recruiters?
Asked if UBS planned to accelerate its development of FA(x), a bank spokesperson said in an email that the Credit Suisse absorption would not result in changes to the strategy. The website is being deployed as UBS rolls back its ranks of "field leaders," professionals who oversee branches and who serve as human recruiters.

UBS's recruiting slowed in the last quarter of 2022. Still, the wirehouse plans to use the site to pick up more advisors in the ultrahigh net worth and high net worth segments.

Through word of mouth, and via UBS field leaders who act as recruiters by posting content from the site on LinkedIn and emailing prospective recruits, the portal has already seen more traffic in each of the past few months since its launch, Larado said. The website is open to the general public.

"We're seeing tens of thousands of visits," he said. "And a majority of the visits are from natural search. So it's not even derived from a direct URL type-in or something along those lines." 

The site quotes an anonymous recruit from JPMorgan Chase who joined UBS  in 2021, long before the website emerged, claiming that their experience had been more "transparent" compared to that at Wells Fargo and Merrill Lynch. The website of Wells Fargo Advisors has a financial advisor Careers page, though it's not clear how long it's been there. Merrill has a couple of pages on its website about general and experienced advisor recruiting, as well as a few informational recruiting pages, including one for certain early career advisors, on parent company Bank of America's site — although the firm did not say how long those pages had been up. 

Rival large broker-dealer Edward Jones has a similar website focused on recruits, though it's not specific to only advisors and also includes job opportunities such as internships. 

There was no prior advisor recruiting webpage on the UBS website before FA(x), a person familiar with the matter said in an email, meaning UBS's effort might be catching up or just keeping with peers in that respect.  

Larado said that experts had contributed content on "strategic segments," information about chief investment office functions, analytics, sustainability, and using technology to grow a book of business.

Chat live
Within two months or so UBS will roll out a new feature, "FA Live," where advisors can request to speak to an advisor at UBS who was recently recruited, Larado said.

He said he was only looking for certain advisors: those who "run businesses that are rooted in advisory, that are focused on ultrahigh net worth and high net worth clients, and that embrace banking and lending." 

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Work on the website began years ago, before UBS field leadership ranks, or "market leaders," were were on track to be slashed in half last November, from roughly 40 to 20, according to an internal memo cited by AdvisorHub. With the layoffs that typically accompany a mega-merger, a bank's field leaders are among the most at risk. That could potentially make UBS's new website a digital replacement for human recruiting tools.

"Those field leadership positions are always vulnerable, because they're non-revenue producing positions," said Jason Diamond, a vice president and senior consultant at industry recruiting firm Diamond Consultants.

Wells Fargo announced similar cuts of market leader roles last month. 

Whether FA(x) will make a difference for UBS is uncertain. "The reality is, especially for larger more sophisticated teams, they were going to find ways to get all that information anyway, whether it was through curated one-on-one sessions or VIP days, or just working directly with the managers to ask those questions," Diamond said. 

"It's a nice way to free up capacity for some of the folks at UBS," he added, but "the heavy lifting on the due diligence probably doesn't change all that much as a result."