Person of the week: Ralph Hamers
The man who gets a bargain of the century
By Wolfram Weimer
03/21/2023, 09:42 am
With the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, a new mega bank is being created in Switzerland. Your boss is a shrewd Dutchman who not only negotiated cleverly. He openly shows his solidarity with the LGBTQ scene and thus antagonizes the right-wing populists.
Ralph Hamers can hardly hide his happiness: “It’s a good day for the Swiss financial center,” he told Swiss television (SRF). But most of all it is good day for him. The CEO of the major bank UBS has taken over its biggest competitor Credit Suisse in a coup d’état and only has to pay three billion francs for it. The second largest bank in Switzerland (167 years old, 531 billion total assets, 50,000 employees) was worth more than seven billion on the stock exchange on Friday. In stock market circles, one whispers the word “bargain of the century”. The prominent Swiss economics professor Sergio Rossi comments on the coup: “UBS has received a gift.”
The fear of a new financial and banking crisis was so great last week that UBS, as the rescuer, was even given state guarantees of CHF 9 billion (the stock market is talking about “euthanasia”) and liquidity commitments of up to CHF 200 billion conceded. When asked by the SRF journalist whether Hamers didn’t get the takeover at an amazingly low price, he replies mischievously: “It’s just a deal … It was important to do it today. It had to happen this weekend.”
Hamers made clever use of the small banking crisis and built a global financial giant in one weekend. The merger of the two institutions will create one of the largest banks in the world. To date, UBS has employed more than 72,000 people and has total assets of USD 1.1 trillion. Now – even after a downsizing – more than 100,000 employees will work for the Swiss financial giant. “We can now be a global bank, with up to 5 trillion in assets under management, in private wealth and asset management. In doing so, we bring the world and Switzerland something to be proud of.”
Hamers is thus expanding UBS’s position as one of the world’s largest wealth managers. You will have to remember his name. And the Dutch CEO even has a name for every single trillion of assets under management: Ralph Adrianus Joseph Gerardus Hamers is his full name.
Farewell in tears
If Hamers manages the takeover well, he can expect one of the highest salaries for a bank manager in Europe in the coming year. UBS is already paying him an average of one million francs a month. In 2022, his earnings totaled CHF 12.6 million. In addition to the fixed salary of CHF 2.9 million, he received a bonus of CHF 9.7 million. However, the clever UBS boss does not live on Lake Zurich, but on Lake Zug, which is tax-efficient. The top tax rate there is only 22.4 percent.
Nevertheless, Hamers enjoys a very good reputation in the banking industry as a committed, honest and successful manager. From 2013 to 2020 he was CEO of the Dutch ING Group. When he took over the management of ING, the institute was in similar difficulties as Credit Suisse is now and dependent on state aid after the financial crisis. Hamers achieved an extremely successful restructuring. Under his leadership, ING became a role model in digital innovation. In 2016, Hammers was then named “European Banker of the Year”. Saying goodbye to ING Bank was not easy for Hamers. He left his long-term employer in tears after 29 years. Companions said goodbye to him with emotional words. Even his wife Patricia and his twin children made an appearance. Hamers calls “his” ING the “orange family”. Now he has to form a new, red and white Swiss family. Many in the financial world trust him because he had already proclaimed “trust” as the core of the brand as a hands-on reorganizer and innovator at ING.
Not everyone in the Alpine republic welcomes the fact that a liberal Dutchman of all people now has to save the conservative but ailing Swiss bank honor. For example, under Hamers, UBS is aggressively supporting the LGBTQ scene. Hamers is photographed waving rainbow flags at the Zurich Pride parade.
The youth organization of the largest Swiss party (the national-conservative SVP) therefore loudly criticizes Hamers and his liberal worldview: “Stop re-education by UBS!” demand the SVP politicians and rage that the major bank UBS under Hamers is driving the “rampant woke culture” to extremes. UBS wants to use internal language rules to ensure that communication is gender-neutral. In addition, UBS actively supports the LGBTQ parades through sponsorship, participation with your own float and advertising on social media. “With the support of the big bank, the transgender ideologues can build disturbed realities far removed from biological facts and common sense and turn tried and tested social values upside down. Children in particular run the risk of being confused and psychologically damaged,” the Swiss conservatives rant. As a protest, the young SVP even demonstratively closed their UBS account. Hamers can take this calmly, he now gets many thousands of new accounts at a bargain price.