UBS's M&A bankers are doing terribly. $200m extra is being cut across the bank
Like clockwork, a few weeks after the Americans, it’s Q3 reporting season for Europe’s investment banks. In England, Barclays was first, last week. Today, there are three: Deutsche Bank in Germany, BNP Paribas in France, and UBS in Switzerland.
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The headline figure, of course, is that UBS’ M&A bankers oversaw a nasty drop in revenue – down by 44% in Q3 of 2026 compared to Q3 of 2025. While banking revenue can be complicated by when exactly deals are booked etc., it’s still not a good result; banks such as JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are up 30% in the same period, while UBS’ main European competitors, Deutsche and Barclays, are up by 19% and 13%, respectively.
The Barclays comparison is particularly painful. UBS has spent years hiring from the British bank, paying huge, allegedly guaranteed bonuses for “top performance”. That hasn’t materialized, and if anything, UBS has slid further and further down the banking league tables over the years, especially in North America, where a lot of the new Barclays veterans joined.
Probably unrelatedly, UBS has found some more cuts to make. “Additional efficiencies” being “identified” this quarter raised the firm’s cost savings target from $13.5bn to $13.7bn. Around $500m of those cuts are still due to occur in Q4.
Most of those savings are related to the Credit Suisse merger, of course. About 98% of ex-Credit Suisse apps are now out of use, and about 90% are “fully decommissioned”. By the end of the year, UBS aims to “materially complete” the wind-down and integration of IT infrastructure legal entities. It’s unclear what will happen to the ex-Credit Suisse people who have been maintaining that.
Elsewise, UBS didn’t do equally awfully. Equities trading revenue was up by 20% compared to Q3 of 2025, which was well behind peers like Goldman Sachs (72%) up but at least better than Bank of America or Citi, which were only up by 11% and 14%, respectively. There was one bright spot for UBS, however: its prime brokerage financing team, which it credited to most of its equities revenue increase.
Fixed income, currencies, and commodities (FICC) trading revenue, which was up 0.7% compared to Q3 of 2025, was possibly even an overperformance; the only bank that did better this results season was Citi, whose FICC traders were up by 4% in the same period.
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