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A potential candidate as successor of Sergio Ermotti at the top of UBS made headlines in recent days. But before the bank is ready to announce a CEO successor, the executive board will undergo change.

The news about a recently launched succession planning for UBS CEO Sergio Ermotti first made the news shortly before Christmas and then a few days ago: Switzerland’s largest bank is looking outside to find a suitable replacement, was the gist of it.

Christian Meissner (pictured below), the former head of investment banking at Bank of America, met with the bank for initial talks, according to «Bloomberg», prompting other news outlets to make the Austrian prime candidate for the UBS top job.

Christian Meissner

The timing of the publication is interesting. Essentially, the bank is by no means in a hurry – a fact that Chairman Axel Weber duly emphasized. Ermotti is in his eighth year as CEO and can easily remain for a further three.

But observers will know: no such information reaches the public sphere unwittingly. Here’s what finews.com thinks may be behind the «communication».

Minus Two Candidates

To say that there is no time pressure is only partly true. After all, UBS has lost two viable candidates for Ermotti’s job – Juerg Zeltner and Andrea Orcel both left in 2018. finews.com reported in November that the bank therefore was starting to look elsewhere for new talent. Only two members of the current executive really have what it takes to be CEO of UBS – the co-head of global wealth management, Tom Naratil and Chief Operating Officer Sabine Keller-Busse. But as COO, Keller-Busse isn’t in charge of a revenue-generating business, a key requirement for the top job at Switzerland’s largest bank.

And that’s how CEO Ermotti and the nomination committee have come under pressure to start their search. When a bank of the size of UBS starts to prepare the ground for a succession at the top, it will typically develop several candidatures. Incidentally, Weber has made it clear that there won’t be a disruptive change.

Department of Ulrich Koerner

It makes therefore sense to expect some sort of change among the executives in the run-up to the replacement of the top person. Some candidates, such as Keller-Busse, will receive new jobs to get a chance to proof that they are ready. Others, such as Meissner, would first have to be installed on the board.