UBS Hires Bankers for New Group Courting Pensions, Wealth Funds

(Bloomberg) -- UBS Group AG is changing the way it covers clients with long-term pools of capital.

The Swiss bank hired former Wells Fargo & Co. bankers Grant Thompson and Sandra Godard as managing directors for a new group dubbed Alternative Capital Solutions, according to a memo sent Wednesday by Sam Kendall, UBS’s head of corporate client solutions in the Americas. Erica Chase, a UBS spokeswoman, confirmed the contents of the memo.

Thompson, who is based in New York, will lead the group serving clients including pensions, sovereign-wealth funds and large family offices, while Toronto-based Godard will focus on Canadian pension funds. The duo started this week, Kendall said in the memo.

“Long-term-horizon capital pools” represent a significant growth area for the bank, Kendall said in the memo. “These investors are becoming increasingly relevant, agile and competitive against traditional financial sponsors and represent an increasingly important component of the market.”

The new UBS team will co-exist with the financial-sponsors team that includes Susan Elolampi, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. investment banker who joined UBS earlier this year to cover family offices.

Separately, UBS is integrating the power, utilities and infrastructure group in the Americas with the financial-sponsors group in the Americas, Chase said, declining to comment further.

That move was made to enhance the bank’s coverage of investors focused on infrastructure opportunities, said a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified. UBS recently sold a portfolio of investment-grade loans in the utilities sector to Bank of Montreal, enabling UBS to accelerate its decision to combine the groups and concentrate on infrastructure investors, the person said. A BMO representative didn’t immediately have a comment.

--With assistance from Kiel Porter.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gillian Tan in New York at gtan129@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alan Goldstein at agoldstein5@bloomberg.net, Dan Reichl, Daniel Taub

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