The bank and wealth management firm said its university involves three elements: the group academics, where junior and senior staff develop professional and leadership skills; divisional academies, designed to enhance skills in various specialist areas, and collaboration with institutions and thought leaders.

The Zurich-listed firm said it needed to upgrade the institution to “stay on top of the game”, such as through mixing programmatic learning with more “fluid and flexible” forms of learning that can fit with a daily working lifestyle; enabling employees to use their unique experiences to drive learning, and make learning less fragmented by building a new UBS University website and learning portal. 

Employees can design their own individual and personalised learning path according to their specific development needs.
 
The university is among a number of institutions created by private banks, either in-house or by partnering with academic bodies, to improve production of wealth managers. In Asia, for example, industry figures say there is a shortage of skilled wealth managers. This publication has tracked those institutions involved in providing post-graduate and MBA programmes in this space. (See here.)

In April this year, UBS officially opened its Beijing campus the UBS University, a sign of how such banks are seeking to drive talent management in mainland China and other parts of the Asia region. The bank opened a campus in Shanghai last year. UBS rival Credit Suisse said in 2015 that there are an estimated 7 million millionaires in the Asia region. On the assumption that a banker can on average handle 35 clients, that would translate into a need to have 200,000 private bankers. But at the moment there are only around 10,000 such people.