Union Bank Of Switzerland Research Articles

The impact of Credit Suisse takeover on Indian banking and financial services sector stocks: an event study analysis

PurposeThe present study aims to comprehensively examine the impact of the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) takeover of Credit Suisse on the banking and financial services sector in the Indian stock market. To fully comprehend the impact of the event, the study separately investigates the response of private sector banks, public sector banks, overall banking companies and financial services companies to the takeover of the second-largest financial institution in Switzerland.Design/methodology/approachThe study employs event study methodology, using the market model, to analyze the event's impact on Indian banking and financial services sector stocks. The data consists of daily closing prices of companies included in the Nifty Private Bank Index, Nifty PSU Bank Index, Nifty Bank Index and Nifty Financial Services Index from the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Furthermore, cross-sectional regression analysis has been conducted to explore the factors that drive abnormal returns.FindingsThe empirical findings of the study suggest the event had a heterogeneous impact on the stock prices of Indian banks and financial services companies. While public sector banks experienced a significant negative impact on select days within the event window, the overall Indian banking sector and financial services companies also witnessed notable declines. In contrast, Indian private sector banks were relatively resilient, exhibiting minimal effects. However, the cumulative effect is found to be insignificant for all four categories across different event windows. The study also observed that the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) were significantly influenced by certain variables during different event windows.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, the present study is the earliest attempt that investigates the impact of the UBS takeover of Credit Suisse on the Indian banking and financial services sector using event study methodology and cross-sectional regression model.

The Guggenheim’s No Country as Refuge: Sopheap Pich and Bordering on Diversity in the Museum

In 2012, the Guggenheim Museum in New York embarked on a five-year financing initiative with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), a global wealth management entity, to curate traveling regional exhibit...

Corporate governance in banks – A view through the LIBOR lens

Misreporting of borrowing rates by large banks and the resulting manipulation of London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) has been the subject of headlines news recently. Confronted with charges from regulators, several banks, such as Barclays, UBS (originally Union Bank of Switzerland) and the Royal Bank of Scotland, have paid huge fines and settled the matter to avoid criminal prosecution. The scandal raises serious questions of corporate governance, and this article examines the issue from the governance perspective, using Barclays as a case study. Internal failures occurred at several levels in Barclays’ reporting of rates. Misreporting was mainly of two varieties – misreporting for personal gain and misreporting encouraged by senior managers, ostensibly in the corporate interests. The article argues that corporate governance systems and structures are powerless in dealing with such fraud or lack of judgment. Misreporting for personal benefit was clearly a breach of the fiduciary duty of loyalty of the managers involved. But misreporting, ostensibly to protect corporate interests, is more probably a breach of the emerging fiduciary duty of good faith. The article also points out that the misdeeds occurred in the banks during an era of financial liberalization and permissiveness. In particular, it highlights that the loose structure of interest derivatives and the potential they offered for speculation were important factors in the practices at the banks involved in the LIBOR episode. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of the LIBOR episode and its consequences for corporate responsibility and accountability as well as public regulation and its efficacy.

Ubisco and CDC: Analysis of a Failure

The Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and Control Data Corporation (CDC) started the Ubisco project in the early 1970s. The project should have automated all the bank's operations with a single CDC computer system, but Ubisco failed four years later. Unraveling the reasons behind the project's failure might help researchers and historians learn why such large computer projects are so often unsuccessful.

Cigarette affordability trends: an update and some methodological comments

Objectives:To calculate cigarette affordability for a number of countries using different techniques and data, to investigate trends since 1990 and to assess the appropriateness of different measures of affordability.Design:Two existing...

Reviving Biomedicine: New Basel institute tackles aging and aims to bolster Swiss research (Research funding)

The Alps have protected the Swiss from centuries of invaders, but even the towering mountains can't shield them from aging. Over the next 50 years, the number of people in industrialized nations aged 65 and over is expected to double, and Switzerland is no exception. Although the snowy passes won't keep away old age, a new Swiss institute aims to take on the scientific and societal challenges associated with the demographic change. On 29 November 2001, Gian-Reto Plattner, vice rector of the University of Basel, announced the formation of the Basel Institute for Diseases of Aging (BIDA), which will dedicate itself to investigating the biology of growing old. The institute was conceived in December 2000, when a group of biochemistry and medical researchers from the Novartis Research Foundation's Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel phoned the vice rector. They wanted to "do something," he says, to focus the considerable science and technology expertise in Basel and the surrounding region, which has been feeling the impact of a spate of negative developments, including last year's closing of the Basel Institute for Immunology and a pronounced exodus of scientists. A brainstorming session led to the idea of a center of excellence in biomedical research. The group hoped to combine the region's strengths--a university, teaching hospitals, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies--to address a topic that is "scientifically novel and interesting and [that] at the same time somehow touches society's interest in a strong way," says Plattner. Aging topped the list of potential areas of study, and BIDA was born. BIDA will operate as an independent, nonprofit research institution associated with the University of Basel. In addition, BIDA will partner with the rest of the biomedical research community in the area to develop a comprehensive science and technology network that will strengthen research and promote economic growth. This group will coordinate resources such as tissue banks, bioinformatics services, facilities for studying animals that model human diseases, and molecular and cellular imaging systems--and negotiate arrangements for their shared use. Rather than study geriatric diseases per se, BIDA will focus on the conditions that predispose people to these disorders, many of which begin well before old age takes hold. The institute's research will home in on degenerative processes, for example, such as cancer metastasis and the neurodegeneration of Alzheimer's disease. The full-grown BIDA will comprise about 20 to 25 research groups totaling roughly 300 researchers. Local government, the University of Basel, and the Novartis Research Foundation provided seed money for a feasibility study and a planning phase. The institute itself will require an additional initial investment of approximately 100 million Swiss francs (US$61.2 million) for building and equipment, plus yearly operating costs of about 40 million Swiss francs (US$24.5 million). The target date for completion of the institute is roughly 2008. But if all goes well, the institute will begin to operate in 2003 on rented premises, says Plattner. BIDA has assembled a star-studded council to hit up public and private sources for the money still required to launch the project. The council includes Nobel laureates, the former head of the Union Bank of Switzerland, and other leaders from government, science, and industry. "We will try to be a little bit American in the way it's done," says Plattner, referring to optimism, enthusiasm, and willingness to go after private money. "Whether that works with Swiss people, we have to find out." --Giselle Weiss Further Reading • Swiss National Science Foundation http://www.snf.ch/default_en.asp • Friedrich Miescher Institute http://www.fmi.ch • Biozentrum at the University of Basel http://www.biozentrum.unibas.ch

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY- A FOCUS ON BANK MERGERS

Mergers and acquisitions (M and A) among financial services institutions have been somewhat of a phenomenon over the last decade, and even more so over the last four to five years. Each week in the USA, the press has been rife with announcement of merger and acquisition plans by large corporations. This merger-mania is not onlysweeping throughout a country in epic proportions, but is now undertaken on a global scale as corporations increase their efforts to become more dominant players in a competitive market place. At the international level, this trend continues, as can be seen by huge deal makings, such as the bank of Tokyo and Mitsubishi of Japan merger to become the largest banking institution in the world. In Switzerland, Bank of Switzerland and Union Bank of Switzerland have merged to become the second largest bank in the world. Here in this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the changingpattern of competition in financial services industry in the USA. However, the paper also discusses the important issues in mergers and acquisitions in general. The study is significant as today, we see that companies are becoming larger in order to compete with each other. A clear understanding of the issues will help organizations to survive in the competitive world. So, the study has got importance both at managerial and academic level.

WHEN SHAREHOLDERS CHOOSE NOT TO MAXIMIZE VALUE: THE UNION BANK OF SWITZERLAND'S 1994 PROXY FIGHT

This paper examines the fight over a share reunification plan that pitted Swiss financier Martin Ebner against Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), once the largest Swiss bank and a global leader in asset management. In the U.S. corporate governance debate, large shareholders are often held up as a possible solution to corporate governance problems. But this examination of the UBS proxy fight shows why some large shareholders can themselves be a source of governance problems.The share reunification plan was designed to combine the firm's two classes of stock: registered (voting) shares and bearer (non‐voting) shares. As its motive for the plan, the UBS board cited a desire both to increase liquidity and to prevent a control change. The majority of the holders of the company's registered stock—many of whom had other financial ties to the bank—ended up voting for a proposal that caused them to lose 11% of the value of their shares during the three trading days following its announcement, and eventually almost twice as much. Moreover, even the holders of the bearer stock hurt themselves by approving the reunification plan. Although the plan clearly transferred value from the registered to the bearer shares, the redistribution benefits from the plan for the bearer shareholders were not sufficient to offset their losses from the reduced probability of a control change.Although it did not succeed in accomplishing its immediate goal, the UBS proxy fight is today recognized as a watershed event in Swiss corporate governance. Until recently, Switzerland's economy has been dominated by cartels, with closely overlapping boards of directors. Hostile takeovers were essentially unheard of, and criticism of management by shareholders was highly unusual. Ebner's activities have had the effect of stimulating public debate about shareholders' rights and shareholder activism. In so doing, they have made it more acceptable for shareholders to criticize management and established shareholder value as a “politically correct” goal for Swiss corporations.

The MENTOR workbench for enterprise-wide workflow management

MENTOR (“Middleware for Enterprise-Wide Workflow Management”) is a joint project of the University of the Saarland, the Union Bank of Switzerland, and ETH Zurich [1, 2, 3]. The focus of the project is on enterprise-wide workflow management. Workflows in this category may span multiple organizational units each unit having its own workflow server, involve a variety of heterogeneous information systems, and require many thousands of clients to interact with the workflow management system (WFMS). The project aims to develop a scalable and highly available environment for the execution and monitoring of workflows, seamlessly integrated with a specification and verification environment. For the specification of workflows, MENTOR utilizes the formalism of state and activity charts. The mathematical rigor of the specification method establishes a basis for both correctness reasoning and for partitioning of a large workflow into a number of subworkflows according to the organizational responsibilities of the enterprise. For the distributed execution of the partitioned workflow specification, MENTOR relies mostly on standard middleware components and adds own components only where the standard components fall short of functionality or scalability. In particular, the run-time environment is based on a TP monitor and a CORBA implementation.

The object revolution. How COM technology is changing the way we do business

Today, advances in personal computing are helping corporations compete in a dynamic, global economy. Businesses, however, need new ways to deliver information systems in a faster, more cost-effective manner. Object technology, in the form of COM (the Common Object Model or Component Object Model), can help businesses meet these needs. This article presents GDES (General Data Extract Service) for client/server computing based on OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and ObjectBroker. GDES is a huge step forward in the Union Bank of Switzerland's (UBS's) client/server computing strategy. It serves as a blueprint for future UBS applications where information is stored on a variety of dissimilar computers and databases.

A program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora

Researchers in both machine translation (e.g., Brown et al. 1990) and bilingual lexicography (e.g., Klavans and Tzoukermann 1990) have recently become interested in studying bilingual corpora, bodies of text such as the Canadian Hansards (parliamentary proceedings), which are available in multiple languages (such as French and English). One useful step is to align the sentences, that is, to identify correspondences between sentences in one language and sentences in the other language.This paper will describe a method and a program (align) for aligning sentences based on a simple statistical model of character lengths. The program uses the fact that longer sentences in one language tend to be translated into longer sentences in the other language, and that shorter sentences tend to be translated into shorter sentences. A probabilistic score is assigned to each proposed correspondence of sentences, based on the scaled difference of lengths of the two sentences (in characters) and the variance of this difference. This probabilistic score is used in a dynamic programming framework to find the maximum likelihood alignment of sentences.It is remarkable that such a simple approach works as well as it does. An evaluation was performed based on a trilingual corpus of economic reports issued by the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in English, French, and German. The method correctly aligned all but 4% of the sentences. Moreover, it is possible to extract a large subcorpus that has a much smaller error rate. By selecting the best-scoring 80% of the alignments, the error rate is reduced from 4% to 0.7%. There were more errors on the English-French subcorpus than on the English-German subcorpus, showing that error rates will depend on the corpus considered; however, both were small enough to hope that the method will be useful for many language pairs.To further research on bilingual corpora, a much larger sample of Canadian Hansards (approximately 90 million words, half in English and and half in French) has been aligned with the align program and will be available through the Data Collection Initiative of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL/DCI). In addition, in order to facilitate replication of the align program, an appendix is provided with detailed c-code of the more difficult core of the align program.

Evaluation of MT Systems at Union Bank of Switzerland

At Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), we have been active in the field of computer-assisted translation (CAT) and, in particular, the evaluation of MT Systems for more than two years. The overall goal of this project is to provide a decision basis for management as regards new technologies relevant to the language industry. Eventually, the project aims at providing translators and other staff members with effective and efficient translation tools (terminology database, MT System(s), grammar and style checkers, etc.). As for MT Systems we have evaluated commerically available products and observed projects still in the research stage. The outline below refers to the strategies employed for the evaluation of MT Systems. An MT System must be evaluated as an overall system and not only for the quality of the MT output. Thus, the aspects to be taken into account comprise the linguistic capabilities of a translation system, the technical environment provided and the organizational changes involved. All three aspects are equally important. As for the procedure, our evaluations are generally carried out inhouse using company-specific texts in both economics/banking and information technology (e.g. user manuals). This approach has proven worthwhile since it allows testing of an MT System in the actual environment and not in a demo-room outside the company. Before illustrating the three categories mentioned above, there are some general aspects of MT evaluation to be pointed out. First, the evaluation criteria and, in particular, their weighting are company-specific and thus subjective to some extent. Second, quality issues should not be quantified; they should be rated according to their degree of importance for the company. And third, the corporate situation of the MT supplier plays an important role when selecting an MT System. Issues raised in this respect include the size of the company (resources for development), the importance of MT software within the overall product range, the market share, management, the financial situation, and very important customer support. Once these general issues are clarified, the MT System is evaluated in linguistic, technical and organizational terms as outlined below. As for the linguistic part, we have tried to assess the quality of the raw

Sniff (abstract)

Sniff is a pragmatic C++ programming environment which has been implemented during the last fifteen months. Sniff is implemented in C++ with the ET++ application framework. It runs on a large number of UNIX workstations under several window management systems such as OSF-Motif, OpenWindows, and Sunview. Sniff is an open environment providing browsing, cross-referencing, design visualization, documentation, and editing support. It delegates compilation and debugging to any C++ compiler and debugger of choice. Sniff has been in internal use at UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) since August 1991. Since then several developers have applied Sniff in developing non- trivial software systems as well as in evolving Sniff. Public domain distribution off Sniff will commenced in May 1992. The main goal in developing Sniff was to create an efficient portable C++ programming environment which makes it possible to edit and browse large software systems textually and graphically with a high degree of comfort, without wasting huge amounts of RAM or slowing down in an annoying way. A further goal was to achieve applicable results within one person year.

Official visit to Japan by the ICRC President

ICRC President Cornelio Sommaruga paid an official visit to Japan from 6 to 14 December 1987.The President, accompanied by Mr. Hans Spiess, ICRC honorary delegate for Japan, Mr. Peter Küng, head of the regional delegation (Far East) and Mr. Cédric Neukomm, delegate responsible for dissemination and co-operation in Asia, first participated in a symposium on the theme “From small peace to large peace”, which was organized by the Japanese Red Cross Society in collaboration with the NHK television station and the newspaper Asahi Shimbun and sponsored by the Union Bank of Switzerland.