UBS hires Morgan Stanley’s Tom Wipf to help lead Credit Suisse tie-up

UBS Group has tapped Tom Wipf, a vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, reported news agency Bloomberg.  Tom Wipf is departing the bank after almost four decades to join the group. 

In a telephonic interview, Wipf confirmed the move, while declining to comment on the specifics of his new role. 

According to his LinkedIn profile, Wipf first joined Morgan Stanley in 1986 after heading up securities lending at Citi.

More recently, though, he’s become known for leading Wall Street through one of its biggest challenges of the last decade: replacing Libor, after waning underlying liquidity and a fixing scandal prompted regulators to initiate an overhaul, reported Bloomberg.

In 2019, when Wipf took over as chair of the Alternative Reference Rates Committee — a transition-guiding body backed by the Federal Reserve — that benchmark still underpinned trillions of dollars of debt. Now, little remains. Libor will officially sunset on June 30.

Wipf is also leaving the ARRC. The committee last week appointed Peter Phelan, chief administrative officer of the Institutional Client Group in North America at Citigroup, as ARRC chair, effective July 1. 

Meanwhile, UBS is dealing with the integration of Credit Suisse Group AG’s business after the bank’s emergency takeover. UBS is reportedly planning to cut more than half of Credit Suisse’s workforce.

Earlier, UBS had announced changes to the executive board of Credit Suisse AG in an internal memo circulated after the Swiss bank announced it had officially closed the takeover of its former rival.

Chief Financial Officer Dixit Joshi and General Counsel Markus Diethelm are among the executives leaving, wrote Ulrich Koerner, Chief Executive of the new UBS subsidiary Credit Suisse AG.

The closing of the deal, announced in an open letter, ends Credit Suisse’s independent existence after 167 years and allows UBS to move forward with the complex integration of the former rival, a process that’s likely to involve thousands of job cuts.