Q1: How did the business perform in 2025, and what drove its growth over the past year? How has the cost-income ratio trended this year, and what were the key factors influencing it? Looking ahead, what are your main priorities and strategic plans for 2026?

Asia Pacific remains a key engine of wealth creation, driven by demographic trends and the ongoing great wealth transfer. Over US$10 trillion will move across the region in the next 20 to 25 years. We will continue to strengthen our presence in core hubs like Singapore and Hong Kong while accelerating momentum in our growth markets, China, Australia, India and Japan, through strategic collaborations such as our SMTB JV in Japan and 360 ONE collaboration in India.

Q2: Looking at the investment outlook for 2026, which markets and asset classes are you prioritising for client portfolios to capture opportunities while managing risks? How are clients currently allocating their portfolios, and what trends are you seeing in DPM adoption and investment behaviour?

We are optimistic about the growth opportunities in the coming year. We continue to advise clients to stay diversified strategically and to focus on emerging growth areas next year. AI will be a key driver, and if it delivers real productivity gains, we should see a continuation of a new growth cycle. 

Apart from AI, we recommend investing in transformational innovations such as power and resources, and in longevity-focused companies. We favour equities in US technology, utilities, and health care; European industrials, technology, and utilities; and Asian markets, including China, Japan, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Indonesia, alongside global banks. 

On the bond side, we focus on high-grade and investment-grade, in particular. Commodities such as copper, aluminium, agricultural products, and gold offer tactical opportunities amid supply-demand imbalances and geopolitical risks.

We have seen a year of record growth in our DPM solutions, driven by clients’ growing desire to professionalise portfolio management and have experts navigate uncertain markets for them. Reinvestments of excessive cash holdings into equity and bond markets were a major driver of inflows this year, as clients sought to lock in attractive bond yields and capture opportunities in equity markets through actively managed portfolios. 

Besides the strong pickup in our flagship multi-asset solutions, our My Way offering is particularly noteworthy, having more than doubled in assets and clients invested in throughout the year. Our most innovative DPM service offers a fully personalised experience for high net worth (HNW) clients, allowing them to build their own portfolio from 80+ investment building blocks and then hand it over to us for day-to-day management.

Q3: With artificial intelligence increasingly shaping the wealth industry, how has the firm leveraged technology and AI to transform processes and enhance value for both clients and the back office? What key technology upgrades were introduced in 2025, and what are your digital priorities for 2026 and beyond?

Wealth management is fundamentally a people business, but AI is set to be a game changer, enabling human expertise and AI intelligence to collaborate for better client outcomes. 

UBS has been using AI for over a decade to enhance productivity and reshape capabilities, and today, our first and largest AI & Transformation Factory in Singapore leads this effort globally. The factory develops and scales cutting-edge solutions, supported by an ecosystem of 700 AI champions and 100 ambassadors, to deliver greater personalisation, speed, and insight. Key initiatives include piloting UBS’s global multi-agentic solution to boost advisor productivity, rolling out our proprietary AI Assistant, RED, to 52,000 colleagues, and deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to 50,000 employees—the largest in the financial sector. 

For us, AI is a powerful enabler of productivity, efficiency, and accuracy, not a replacement for people. Ultimately, our business’s transformation is about reshaping business, operating, and talent models to unlock new capabilities and deliver sustained value to clients and shareholders.