The Swiss bank’s new platform provides open architecture price discovery for structured products and execution on over 1,500 underlying across the major equity markets, according to the bank’s announcement on 3 October.
UBS has debuted a new digital platform for structured products in which its wealth management clients in Hong Kong SAR and Singapore can customise and transact structured products such as equity-linked notes (ELN) and reverse convertible notes (RCN), via e-banking and mobile.
It makes sense to allow clients to be self-directed by the most common and highly used structures we see in a day-to-day business - Nicola Pantone
Designed in-house in 2022 and following a pilot phase in the region during summer 2023, the new digital platform was designed to provide commoditised structures in which clients can see the benefits of transacting themselves, Nicola Pantone (pictured), co-head unified global markets Apac at UBS, told SRP.
“Asia is very transactional,” Pantone said. “It makes sense to allow clients to be self-directed by the most common and highly used structures we see in a day-to-day business.”
The digital platform offers open architecture price discovery and execution on over 1,500 underlying across the major equity markets.
According to Pantone, prior to the launch of the digital platform, clients would have to call the client advisors to go through the details of the trade’s price discovery, disclosures and transaction tracking offline, which would possibly take 10 to 30 minutes, as opposed to the enablement of confirming trades and bringing more efficiency.
Meanwhile, UBS’ latest product development coincided with a surge in trading volumes on its multi-issuer multi-asset platform, Structured Products Investor (SPI), over the past year - the number of trades across all equity structured products traded on the SPI platform jumped 57% year-over-year (YoY), while the number of trades for RCN on the platform soared 78% YoY.
Over 30,000 structured products trade on SPI every year across all platform-supported products.
“Flow is back, and so has the number of clients discovering and using structure products increased significantly,” Pantone said, noting the bank’s increasing volume of trades over the last year.
Pantone also highlighted the growth of risk appetite and diversification across asset classes as one of the major overarching themes across markets – for example, started last year and continued this year, there is “a lot of interest in fixed-income related structured products or cash management for yield enhancements,” he added.
The new platform is a part of the bank’s digital ecosystem, which already offers trading of various products – such as cash equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, and funds – to its wealth management clients.
According to Pantone, once the service matures and adds more payoff structures, the bank expects to see around 30% of its trading volumes going through the digital channel as its aspiration target with no specific targeted timeline.
The bank hopes to have the number of activation clients on the digital platform reach a peak by the end of 2024 and eventually expand the platform at a global level, said Pantone.