UBS Investment Bank - Prime Services

UBS Investment Bank - Prime Services

UBS Investment Bank traces its roots to 1862, when the Bank in Winterthur was founded in Switzerland. The Prime Services division sits under Rob Karofsky, who presides over the broader investment bank at UBS Group. The wealth origin for the unit is UBS Group AG, a Swiss multinational bank that emerged from the 1998 merger of Union Bank of Switzerland and Swiss Bank Corporation. Strategy and deployment focus on prime brokerage, including securities financing, capital introduction, and risk management for hedge funds and institutional asset managers. The unit provides leverage, trade execution, and custody across equities, fixed income, and derivatives. It lends to funds like Citadel and Millennium (per Bloomberg, 2024). Coverage extends across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with offices in New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The Prime Services division is part of UBS's Global Markets segment, which reported $4.5B in revenue in Q4 2025 (per UBS, January 2026). Team size is not publicly disclosed for this unit specifically. Adjacent vehicles include UBS Asset Management, which runs $1.6T in invested assets, and UBS Wealth Management. November 2025: UBS completed the integration of Credit Suisse's prime brokerage operations, consolidating client accounts and technology platforms (per Reuters, November 2025). A structural differentiator: UBS Prime Services operates as a balance-sheet provider within a systemically important bank, giving it lower cost of capital than independent prime brokers. It also offers clients access to UBS's global custodian network and corporate bank lending. The division's survival after the 2008 financial crisis and the 2023 Credit Suisse rescue underscores its embeddedness in the bank's core infrastructure, unlike many but prime brokers that have consolidated.