UBS has said it will be “building on” its real estate and private markets business, in its latest annual report.
The investment bank flagged a range of alternative asset classes in the report, including real estate and private markets, indexed and alternative beta strategies, exchange-traded funds, and sustainable- and impact investing products and solutions.
“In our real estate and private markets business, we continue to build on our global scale, leading core capabilities and highly differentiated sustainable-investing and specialized-thematic offering, including our cold storage, energy storage and life sciences strategies,” the bank said.
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“We also continue to expand our leading multi-manager capabilities across real estate, infrastructure and private equity, including the development of new products to meet the growing demand from wealth management clients.”
It flagged sustainable and impact investing as key areas of interest for the bank’s clients, hence expanding its offering across new net-zero ambition products in 2023.
The bank’s real estate and private markets division is one of five business areas, which it said worked holistically across the bank to “serve our clients as one firm”.
The report said the collaboration between business divisions was “critical to the success of our strategy and is a source of competitive advantage”.
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The bank’s highlights for 2023 included being the second largest asset manager of sustainable investing assets for the year to 31 December 2023, as well as having $213bn (£169bn) of assets invested in alternatives, such as hedge fund businesses, real estate and private markets.
The bank reported this week that it had sold $8bn of senior secured loans to alternative asset manager Apollo, as part of its efforts to sell off non-core assets from its takeover of Credit Suisse last year.
UBS said the deal was the final step in its carve-out of Credit Suisse’s securitised products business, which Apollo rebranded Atlas.
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