With the accumulation of bad news morale is going down visibly. Successive leadership changes have ruined the Collardi/can-do spirit and slowly imposed a technocratic, siloed, UBS-type culture, yet without UBS’ first grade execution capabilities (i.e. the worst of both worlds). Risk paranoia has slowly taken over the organisation impeding business, and FINMA has managed to impose widely a public administration-like cover-my-back mentality, instead of letting bankers do their job and truly cover real risks with proper incentives.
Long term (real) innovation is also absent as the whole bank is distracted by past issues or is busy fighting internally on how to waste billions of hard-earned cash between overpaying RMs with debatable contributions to the whole value chain, upgrading systems into technologies that are already outdated, or giving leftovers to shareholders.
Nevertheless I think JB is a fantastic acquisition target for a buyer with a high disruptive power, given its unique client book.