The world's largest private bank is launching a five-year plan to win more business off the wealthiest women, a market expected to grow by more than one-third in the next four years.
Women such as Chinese property tycoon Zhang Xin and Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken, who controls the world's third-largest brewery, and commodities billionaire Margarita Louis-Dreyfus highlight the growing importance women in finance and private banking.
On Tuesday, Zurich's UBS said it plans to pour resources into better catering to female clients under a push by private bank head Juerg Zeltner.
«Research shows that women are not adequately served by wealth managers today and this represents a huge opportunity,» Zeltner said in a statement in which the bank pledged to prioritize women as a segment.
UBS, the world's largest private bank by assets, will «significantly scale up» changes it has made at its private bank in the past two years to better capture female-controlled money, Zeltner said.
Five-Year Plan
The move, part of a five-year plan, seeks to capture share in a market that UBS expects to grow to $18 trillion by 2021 – more than the combined gross domestic product of China and India – from $13 trillion currently. The bank forecasts the sum of money controlled by women to outpace men's money by a factor of 1.6 in the next five years.
The bank efforts, led by Mara Harvey, a managing director in wealth management, are underpinned by data showing female investors are typically more interested in investing for social change as much as for healthy returns. Female investors could be set to put $2.3 trillion into play by 2021 in order to improve society, according to UBS.
Specific measures planned by the bank include a gender view of all its standard processes, measuring client satisfaction by gender, establish a diverse advisory board, develop its offering of sustainable, long-term, diverse investments, training private bankers, and improving female representation at executive level to one-third, from 25 percent currently.
