Sergio Pietro Ermotti is a Swiss investment banker and former stock trader. He has been the chief executive officer of UBS Group AG since November 2011. Ermotti is slated to succeed Walter Kielholz as the incoming chairman of Swiss Re, Switzerland's largest reinsurance company, in 2021. He previously served as the deputy chief executive for Italian bank UniCredit, from 2007 to 2010. Leading UBS, Ermotti denounced the 2011 rogue trader scandal, implementing strict corporate policies governing community standards and initiated a major restructuring of the bank around private banking and limited its sell side operations. Leading the firm for nearly a decade, he is the longest serving head of UBS. In February 2020 UBS announced that Ralph Hamers, CEO of ING Group, would be succeeding Sergio Ermotti as CEO on 1 November. It has been speculated that he might transition into Swiss politics after his career in banking. He ruled out entering select political races for the Bundesrat stating that he was "not a politician". In addition to English, Ermotti speaks Italian, German, and French fluently.
Early life and education
Sergio Pietro Ermotti was born on 11 May 1960 in Lugano, Switzerland, an Italian-speaking city. He left school at age 15 to pursue aspirations of being a footballer and skier. Before turning 18 and enrolling in college to fulfill theses aspirations, Ermotti decided to fill his time with an apprenticeship at the Cornèr Bank in Lugano to "get up to speed with accounting, finance, and so on". At his apprenticeship, he learned to sell and trade stocks. Although Ermotti did not attend university, he received a Swiss federal banking expert diploma and subsequently attended the Advanced Management Program at Oxford University.
Banking career
After his apprenticeship as a stockbroker at the Cornèr Bank, Ermotti was later promoted to trading. In 1985, Ermotti moved to Citibank in Zurich where he traded equity-linked products and later served as its Resident Vice President. In 1987, he went on to the Swiss office of the US investment bank Merrill Lynch in Zurich, and stayed with the bank for 16 years. He started with holding various positions in equity derivatives and capital markets, and contributed to the expansion of the capital market business of the bank in french-speaking parts of Switzerland. In 1993, he was promoted to the position of Managing Director and moved to London being in charge for the European equity derivatives unit. Three years later, in 1996, Ermotti relocated to New York, as a head of global derivatives trading. He was eventually promoted to co-head of global equity markets and a member of the executive management committee for global markets & investment banking at Merrill Lynch, where he worked from 2001 to 2003. He joined the Italian bank UniCredit headquartered in Milan, in December 2005 as head of markets & investment banking. At that point in time, UniCredit took over German bank, HypoVereinsbank. From 2007, he was UniCredit's deputy chief executive officer with responsibility for the strategic business area, corporate and investment banking and private banking, before leaving in 2010. Ermotti was appointed chairman and chief executive of UBS's Europe, Middle East, and Africa group, and became a member of the group executive board in April 2011. He was appointed interim group CEO in September 2011, and permanently in November 2011. In response to the 2011 UBS rogue trader scandal, Ermotti sent an internal memo stating: "I want to make clear that no one's personal interest nor any amount of revenue is worth more than the bank's reputation". Because of his new responsibility as CEO, he resigned from his position as a president of Darwin Airline in 2011. Ermotti was a member of the board at the London Stock Exchange between September 2008 and July 2013. In 2012, he tapped a colleague from Merrill Lynch, Andrea Orcel, to lead UBS's investment banking arm, eventually assisting him in navigating the 2013 Libor trading scandal, a major corporate restructuring, and a major expansion of mergers and acquisitions activity. In November 2014, he became the CEO for UBS Group AG permanently. In 2015, the Swiss newspaperSchweiz am Sonntag named him as the most successful manager of a company listed on the Swiss Market Index. His salary in fiscal year 2017 was estimated to be US$14.9 million. In February 2020 UBS announced that Ralph Hamers CEO of ING Group would be succeeding Sergio Ermotti as CEO on 1 November. Swiss Re, Switzerland's largest reinsurance company, announced its intention to onboard Ermotti as its next chairman in 2021 succeeding Walter Kielholz.
