Union Bancaire Privée

Nicolas Faller serves as Co-CEO of Asset Management, overseeing the investment platform alongside CEO Guy de Picciotto, who retains overall strategic authority. Faller manages teams across alternative investments, traditional portfolios, and advisory. UBP's investment committee operates with a multi-manager philosophy, picking external hedge fund, private equity, and private credit managers rather than running a single internal investment book.

UBP relies on a dedicated manager research team operating from Geneva, London, New York, and Hong Kong. The bank's long-standing presence in the Swiss hedge fund ecosystem — as one of the country's largest allocators to external managers — provides access to capacity-constrained strategies that larger consolidators often miss. For private equity, UBP combines primary fund commitments with direct co-investments, leveraging relationships built across decades of backing European small and mid-market managers.

UBP is a fully licensed Swiss commercial bank and asset manager that happens to be family-owned — it is not a single family office. The de Picciotto family owns 100 percent of the equity, but the institution serves external clients, including private individuals, family offices, pension funds, and other institutions. The firm's governance and regulatory posture are those of a Swiss FINMA-supervised bank, not a private investment office.

Both. UBP's private equity unit primarily invests via fund-of-funds structures, committing to external general partners across buyout, growth, and venture strategies. The firm supplements these commitments with direct co-investments alongside trusted managers. In hedge funds, UBP operates exclusively through allocations to external funds rather than running proprietary trading strategies.

UBP actively seeks co-investment opportunities as a way to reduce blended fees and gain concentrated exposure to high-conviction deals. The firm's co-investment program runs alongside its fund-of-funds activity rather than as a standalone direct investment engine. Co-investments typically target the same small and mid-market European and North American managers already approved through the primary fund commitment pipeline.

UBP operates asset management as a distinct unit under Co-CEO Nicolas Faller, with separate investment teams, risk oversight, and client reporting. The bank's wealth management arm — which generates the majority of revenue — distributes asset management products to private clients and also runs its own discretionary mandates. Institutional clients access the alternatives platform directly through dedicated relationship managers.

UBP does not operate a direct commodity trading business or run dedicated natural resources extraction strategies, unlike some Swiss peers with physical trading desks. The bank also avoids direct real estate development, preferring to invest through third-party fund managers. UBP has historically been selective in venture capital, concentrating on established growth-stage and buyout strategies rather than early-stage technology.