Has UBS missed the US wealth management M&A boom?
UBS Group’s appetite for acquisitions goes beyond its mega-deal last year to purchase the distressed Credit Suisse Group, with the chair of UBS saying over the weekend that its next set of targets is likely to be wealth management firms in the United States, starting a few years from now.
The question hanging over such a target, one banker said, is whether UBS will be arriving too late to the wealth management M&A boom of the past decade, which has seen a host of firms, from assets managers to registered investment advisors and broker-dealers, acquired by buyers in a drive for growth and a greater share of clients’ wallets.
“That’s the assessment,” said Larry Roth, managing partner at RLR Strategic Partners. “UBS could be late to the M&A party, which already has significant, well-run firms that are having success in this area,” Roth said, mentioning firms like Morgan Stanley, LPL Financial Holdings Inc. and Raymond James Financial Inc. as successful recent buyers of financial services firms.
UBS chair Colm Kelleher said in an interview Sunday with Swiss newspaper NZZ – Neue Zurcher Zeitung – that UBS wants to expand its U.S. wealth management business through potential M&A in three or four years.
“Only in wealth management and not yet,” Kelleher added, according to Reuters.
A UBS spokesperson in the United States declined to comment Monday morning.
Recent history shows mixed results for giant banks like UBS that complete such acquisitions. UBS currently employs close to 6,000 financial advisors in the United States.
On the one hand, Morgan Stanley, which competes directly with UBS in the United States, has been praised for its deft handling of large, significant acquisitions that have remade the firm in recent
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