UBS Group AG (UBS) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

April 26, 2022 3:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Welcome to the First Quarter 2022 Results Presentation. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. [Operator instructions].

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Sarah Mackey, UBS Investor Relations. Please go ahead, madam.

Sarah Mackey

Good morning, and welcome, everyone. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to our cautionary statement slide at the back of today's results presentation. Please also refer to the risk factors in our 2021 annual report, together with additional disclosures in our SEC filings.

On Slide two, you can see our agenda for today. It's now my pleasure to hand over to Ralph Hamers, Group CEO.

Ralph Hamers

Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone. The first quarter of '22 was dominated by extraordinary geopolitical macro events as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And during these turbulent times, we've remained focused on three key priorities: executing our strategic plans, serving our clients and managing risk. We once again proved the benefits of our global scale and the power of our ecosystem for investing, and we're working hard to enhance it every day.

Our clients had a navigated challenging and complex environment, as you can well understand. So our focus was to really stay close to them and advise them on their portfolios and risk management. At the same time, we prudently manage our own risk by working together across the businesses and the control functions, we further reduced our exposure to Russia.

Our focus on clients and risk management resulted in another strong quarter financially, and it highlighted the resilience of our diversified business. We have and will continue to execute on our strategy regardless of the market volatility.

On Slide four, you can see some of the milestones that we have achieved so far this year and in an environment of higher rates, higher inflation, higher volatility, it's more important than ever to ensure that portfolios are well diversified, including exposure to alternatives.

And during the last quarter, our wealth management clients committed $8 billion to private markets. Our U.S. clients continue to value our seamless offering for separately managed accounts we saw another $7.5 billion of inflows in the first quarter. Sustainability, as you can well imagine, remains important for our clients, for us as well. And this quarter, we launched a number of sustainable finance products. For example, a new climate transition fund in collaboration with Aon. And in Switzerland, we now also offer mortgages with preferential interest rates if the proceeds are used to improve energy efficiency of buildings.