Switzerland's biggest bank is redecorating the reception areas and meetings rooms where it caters for rich clients – worldwide. finews.asia has the pictures.
The meetings rooms are luxurious in the materials used yet sober in design, a first glance at the showpiece in Zurich reveals. The heavy curtains of banking past have been swept away with by age of the automatic exchange of informatio and have given way to a free view over Switzerland's heart of banking, Paradeplatz and Bahnhofstrasse, the shopping mile of Zurich's rich people.
The chairs in black leather upholstery are comfortable and easily moved around, in consideration of the elderly customers.
The table oozes quality. «We used only first-class materials and furniture mostly from Swiss producers,» Dirk Klee (pictured below), chief operating officer at UBS Wealth Management told finews.asia.
Klee was responsible for the implementation of the new design standards.
The rich and very rich of Zurich have already enjoyed the understated luxury for six months, with Singapore, Hong Kong and Osaka (pictured below) following suit recently. Over the coming years, all private-banking offices will be adjusted to conform to the new design.
Style With a Hefty Price Tag
The price tag will remain secret, but UBS hasn't been stingy: Klee says the bank will spend millions of francs on the redesign, with a total in the high double-digits. The bank evidently didn't define the new standard to safe money, but rather to make its modern-day values more visible.
Perhaps surprisingly, UBS chose not to use a star designer, but to develop the new look itself, with some help of its customers. The bank asked its clients what they expected when going for a meeting and subsequently developed a design standard that is now applied at all its branches.
The pictures on the walls are the only details differentiating one office from the other – «and they all naturally are originals,» Klee insisted.
The design language applied has the same function as at any consumer brand store. «The customer needs to feel what UBS stands for, when he comes to us for advice,» Klee said. The attributes UBS would like its clients to connect with the bank are professionalism, a sense for quality and 'Swissness'.
The digital world may open a panoply of options for what a bank can offer its clients, but the physical appearance of a bank remains as important as the personal contact with its customers, according to the COO. «The new world of private banking is a combination of 'High Touch' and 'High Tech',» Klee said.
