The former head of UBS' digital efforts in private banking who cut a colorful figure in Zurich's staid finance circles has resurfaced after leaving the Swiss bank earlier this year, finews.asia has learned.
Dave Bruno spent seven years building up what Zurich-based UBS called wealth management innovation, putting strong emphasis on digitization and new ways of reaching an emerging generation of wealthy clients.
The American banker cultivated an eclectic personality to go with his role: shorts and colorful t-shirts instead of grey suits, hair tied back into a man-bun, and a «Superdave» avid social media presence often featuring his weightlifting feats, instead of the anonymity many Swiss bankers prefer.
Quietly Buried
Bruno and his 12-person UBS team were the force behind projects like an interactive dialogue tool UBS is testing with Amazon; SmartWealth, a digital wealth manager the Swiss bank rolled out earlier this year; or UBS Safe, a digital document repository that its Swiss bank introduced.
As is typical for fintech and startups, not everything Bruno touched led to success: one of his biggest projects, Ynome, a promising Trip Advisor-like site for financial providers, was quietly buried at the end of last year with little explanation from the bank.
Now, Bruno has surfaced as a startup coach at F10 (see below), a Zurich-based fintech incubator supported by SIX, Julius Baer, Baloise Insurance, PWC and Italian insurer Generali. He is also still using social media to promote fintech, capturing finews.asia's visit to the F10 on his daily video:
Bruno will provide coaching for startups at F10, a competitor platform to the UBS- and Credit Suisse-backed Kickstart Accelerator.
Fintech Stress Testing
F10 puts budding finance firms to a rigorous nine-month «prototype to product» program to stress test the viability of their ideas. The program brought forth Enterprise Bot, which builds machine learning-enabled chat bots for finance firms to understand and respond to customer queries.
Last year, it graduated eight firms including Enterprise Bot. This year, F10 is aiming for 15 firms.
Enrollees include Think Yellow, an effort by two Danish economists to promote gender equality through investing; Brainalyzed, two German software engineers who are building an artificial intelligence-based algorithm to scan and react to market movements; and Hoken, an insurtech startup that allows clients to buy or cancel insurance policies via mobile phone.
