Crestone’s Mike Chisholm hasn’t kept all of UBS Wealth Management

Joe Aston

Now to that other bastion of corporate self-delusion, Swiss financial services shop UBS.

A modest 100 per cent of the bank’s wealth management advisers want to make the dutiful jump to spin-off Crestone, according to its boss, Mike Chisholm. It took him just hours to revise that retention figure down to 90 per cent. But both numbers were implausible.

Chisholm called staff into a meeting last Sunday and sought commitments from them on the spot. That grated, given that Chisholm’s biggest revenue writers had been shopping themselves (and their clients) around mid-tier firms for weeks – but failed to attract a bidder. And, despite all that’s been said and done, that Crestone doesn’t even have a financial services licence!

No surprise then that now at least a third of advisers are negotiating with the likes of Melbourne boutique Escala (run by former colleagues), a growing Shaw Stockbroking, or Koda Capital. After all, in the Australian market, the UBS name ain’t what it used to be…

AFR Weekend