The Financial Times reports that 'UBS is planning further drastic cutbacks in its struggling investment bank as Switzerland’s largest bank by assets accelerates a retreat to its more profitable wealth management business'.
According to the newspapers sources, the move will prompt the loss of several thousand jobs in the investment bank and in support functions across the group.
Bank executives are said to have been locked in a board meeting in New York on Tuesday to thrash out final details of the plan.
In the meantime, Reuters reports that, according to a source, UBS is set to cut 400 investment banking jobs as early as today, with more job losses at the Swiss bank likely to follow.
The 400 initial job cuts would translate to less than 2.5% of UBS's overall investment bank, which employed 16,432 people at the end of June.
The cuts are planned for corporate finance fixed income and equities across all the Swiss bank's regions, the source said.
And The Wall Street Journal reports that Jim O'Neill, the head of UKFI, the body that oversees the UK's 81% investment in Royal Bank of Scotland, has said that the bank still needs to shrink its investment banking unit.
'We do have a view that the investment bank shape and size ultimately should be smaller than it is today', he said Tuesday.
And Sky News reports that the purge of Barclays' top management under its new chief executive has continued with the departure of the bank's group human resources director, Sally Bott.
Her exit last week, which is likely to have been accompanied by a substantial payoff in line with her contract, is the latest in a string of changes engineered by Antony Jenkins, Barclays' new chief executive.
Finally, Reuters reports that as well as firing thousands of staff, investment banks in Asia are quietly culling clients, too.
One head of a global investment bank in Asia said he sees 'no path to profitability' for stand-alone investment banking in the region. Others say Asian companies don't use investment banks loyally enough, or often enough, to sustain the broad-based investment banking coverage model that grew up in the years before the financial crisis.
Banks resisted making cuts in the wake of the crisis and as IPO fees began to recede. Now, with few deals and thin fee streams, investment banks in Asia are wielding the axe.
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