On Tuesday, Swiss bank UBS reported a 63% rise in second-quarter net profit as markets continued to facilitate the world’s largest wealth manager generate higher earnings from managing the rich’s wealth. UBS’s second-quarter net profit reached $2.01 billion, up from $1.23 billion in the same quarter last year. The profit exceeded analyst predictions of $1.34 billion.
The Swiss bank is pushing to improve its digital services in a bid to extend its customer reach outside the super-rich, which is currently its primary client base. According to a June report by Reuters, UBS sees potential for a new online platform that would bring in $30 billion in the next year.
On Tuesday, UBS also reported $25 billion in new client inflows. This, in combination with strong markets, has helped to push invested assets in the bank’s global wealth management business up by an additional 4%, reaching a total of $3.2 trillion.
Throughout the pandemic, UBS’s trade with ultra-wealthy clients also remained strong, boosting the Swiss bank’s pre-tax profits by 47% in its flagship business.
The Banking For Impact (BFI) consortium will measure the environmental impact of their activities in a bid to increase impact management and reduce deficiencies of their current assessments of the sector’s non-financial performance.
On Wednesday, the BFI released its four-step agreement. The agreement seeks to quantify, value, attribute, and aggregate to encompass the full extent of environmental and social impact along each financial institutions’ value chain. Members of the BFI include Swiss investment bank UBS, Danish Bank Danske Bank, Dutch bank ABN AMRO, the Harvard Business School, and the Impact Institute.
The group has said that financial firms need to first quantify impacts in order to measure, manage, and report different impacts in a consistent way. It has stressed that some impacts are easy to measure, such as the amount of CO2 emissions produced, whilst others are much more difficult. Following such calculations, impacts then need to be translated into monetary values, allowing them to be evaluated in relative terms. Valuation will show whether the pros outweigh the cons.
The BFI has also stated that there should be a clear attribution approach for deciding exactly how much impact ought to be attributed to each financial company. For many financial institutions, the majority of their impact is indirect, but the BFI has insisted that firms still hold part of the responsibility for indirect impact. All relevant and helpful information will be combined and used for comparison and decision-making.
BFI’s long-term goal is to push sustainability forward in the financial sector. It hopes to have an open-source, standardised impact measurement and valuation method that is widely utilised across different financial companies. BFI is set to release a procedure for banks later this year.
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More information: http://www.ubs.com/careers
