By Stefania Spezzati and Noele Illien
LONDON/ZURICH (Reuters) – UBS Group chief executive Sergio Ermotti said it will take months before Switzerland adopts new banking rules to help prevent bank runs and that he did not expect them to put the country at a disadvantage compared to other jurisdictions.
Ermotti was asked about proposed new measures to prevent future banks runs, which might include some limits on withdrawals and imposing fees on exits, as reported by Reuters last week.
“I’m convinced that Switzerland will keep its standards,” Ermotti said. “I don’t see us being particularly disadvantaged compared to any other jurisdictions in terms of liquidity ordinance,” he told analysts while presenting the bank’s third-quarter results.
“We will follow up, and I think it’s going to still take months and months before the full analysis of what happened will translate into concrete actions,” he said, adding it was hard to track all ideas reported in the media.
“Our speculation… I don’t believe this is going to be part of the package,” responding to a question about the too-big-to-fail review that will be presented in the spring. “At this stage… even the finance minister took an official stance on the matter.”
Reuters reported that one option being discussed is staggering a greater portion of withdrawals over longer periods of time, citing a person familiar with the matter.
However, Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter told Bloomberg on Friday such measure was not being considered as part of Switzerland’s review of its financial regulation.
Asked about how UBS may be addressing the task of making deposits less fickle, Chief Financial Officer Todd Tuckner told reporters that “clients will rotate into fixed-term preferred deposits and in that sense they are stickier over the term – in general the relationships are developed over many, many years and last many, many years.”
(Reporting by Stefania Spezzati, Noele Illien and Oliver Hirt; Editing by Elisa Martinuzzi and Tomasz Janowski)
