UBS' partnership with the famed portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz is meant to raise awareness – and spur business with women.
Held in an old transformer station on the banks of Zurich's Sihl river, the exhibition showcases dozens of Annie Leibovitz's portraits of women, from British royalty to Las Vegas showgirls. Leibovitz and UBS' Swiss head Martin Blessing introduced the Zurich exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday.
Besides New York-based Leibovitz's star power, what is the draw for UBS?
It is a powerful sponsoring tool for the bank, which also has an extensive collection of contemporary art thanks to its acquisition of Paine Webber in 2000. The bank has held three client events in each of the ten cities the exhibition has been held in, including Mexico City, Singapore, New York and San Francisco.
It also underscores UBS' desire to target women more specifically because it expects the market to outpace wider private banking industry growth.
Banks Lagged
The exhibition, which includes portraits of tennis player Serena Williams and Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, provides UBS with a way to highlight its marketing efforts with women. Financial firms have been slow to embrace women as a segment, something UBS is seeking to change.
«I think the financial industry has really lagged in their response to women. We have a few initiatives to address that, and we need to scale them,» UBS' Mara Harvey said. Harvey runs the ultra-high net worth practice in Austria, Germany and Italy.
This includes improving female representation in management to one-third, from 25 percent currently, as well as educating private bankers on how to better serve female clients. «The dialogue is shifting, maybe not as fast as we would like, but by educating private bankers and by increasingly diversifying teams, we will accelerate that,» Harvey said.
