UBS and the end of Credit Suisse in Ticino

Two big banks with Ticinese roots

The big banks have been present in Ticino since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their regional history is intertwined with the history of the financial centre. Credit Suisse's Chiasso branch was the scene of the scandal of 1977 analysed in Chapter D.III, which led to the first Swiss agreement on due diligence. UBS, through its predecessor institutions, appears in the ABT's list of members as one of the three founding members of 1920, together with the Banca dello Stato and the Società Bancaria Ticinese.¹ For decades the two banks competed in every Ticino town with branches that were often a few dozen metres apart. When UBS took over Credit Suisse in March 2023, the Swiss Italian broadcaster RSI measured the distances: in Locarno the branches of the two banks were 130 metres apart, and in Lugano two pairs of branches were separated by 90 and 77 metres respectively. Nationally, three quarters of the 98 Credit Suisse branches lay within 400 metres of one of UBS's 191 branches.²

The takeover was announced on 19 March 2023 after the Federal Council had adopted emergency ordinances to support the transaction, and the legal merger of the two parent companies followed on 12 June 2023.³ The integration of the Swiss banking business, the subject that mattered most for Ticino, took longer. Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG was merged into UBS Switzerland AG in 2024, and the migration of clients and branches continued into 2025.⁴

Integration on the ground

In October 2023 UBS announced its new regional management for Ticino. Luca Pedrotti, who had worked at UBS for almost 35 years, took over the region, which then counted about 400 UBS employees and 15 branches in southern Switzerland. Marzio Grassi, who had led Credit Suisse's Ticino region since 2018 with nearly 290 employees and eight branches, moved to head the corporate and real estate business. The financial portal finews noted at the time that UBS's chief executive Sergio Ermotti, who grew up in Ticino, had placed long-standing Ticinese colleagues in the regional leadership, and anticipated that the duplication of branches would lead to closures and job cuts.⁵ The cantonal statistics confirm the direction. The number of big banks in Ticino fell from two in 2023 to one in 2024, and the number of big bank branches from 26 to 22.⁶

The best documented case is Chiasso, the border town where Credit Suisse had kept a large office since the days of the lira economy. On 20 January 2025 UBS announced that the former Credit Suisse building on Piazza Indipendenza would close on 31 January 2025. Of about 120 employees, roughly 100 moved to UBS's Palazzo Mercurio in the same town and the others to the UBS centre in Manno near Lugano. Pedrotti explained the choice by the higher maintenance costs of the old building and the investments it would have required.⁷ On 3 February 2025 the Credit Suisse branches in Chiasso and Locarno were absorbed into the respective UBS branches, with about 100 employees in Chiasso and about 50 in Locarno.⁸ With these steps the name that had been associated with the Chiasso scandal and with half a century of Italian private banking in the border town disappeared from the streets of Ticino.

Notes

1. Associazione Bancaria Ticinese, "Membri" (above) (UBS SA, Banca dello Stato del Cantone Ticino and Società Bancaria Ticinese SA listed as founding members of 1920). The predecessor institution through which UBS holds this status has not been identified. ↩
2. RSI, "UBS e CS, pochi passi tra le filiali" (1 April 2023), https://www.rsi.ch/info/svizzera/UBS-e-CS-pochi-passi-tra-le-filiali--1814046.html. ↩
3. UBS Group AG, media releases of 19 March 2023 (announcement) and 12 June 2023 (completion of the acquisition); Ordinance on Additional Liquidity Assistance Loans and the Granting of Default Guarantees by the Federal Government for Liquidity Assistance Loans by the Swiss National Bank to Systemically Important Banks of 16 March 2023, SR 952.3. ↩
4. UBS Group AG, media release on the merger of Credit Suisse (Schweiz) AG into UBS Switzerland AG (1 July 2024). The progress of the client migration in 2025 is reflected in the Ticino reports cited below. ↩
5. finews.com, "UBS: The Ermotti Connection Plays in Ticino" (27 October 2023), https://www.finews.com/news/english-news/59918-ubs-luca-pedrotti-sergio-ermotti-connection-marzio-grassi-remo-crameri-claudio-scrafone. The article refers to Ermotti's attachment to "his boyhood club in Lugano", FC Collina d'Oro. ↩
6. USTAT, 12 Denaro e banche (March 2026, above), T. 12.1 and T. 12.2. ↩
7. Tio.ch, report on the closure of the former Credit Suisse seat in Piazza Indipendenza, Chiasso (20 January 2025), https://www.tio.ch/ticino/cronaca/1810369/chiude-i-battenti-la-sede-dell-ex-credit-suisse-in-piazza-indipendenza. ↩
8. Tio.ch, "A Chiasso e Locarno Credit Suisse diventa UBS" (February 2025), https://www.tio.ch/ticino/attualita/1812970/a-chiasso-e-locarno-credit-suisse-diventa-ubs. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.