Biography|Sergio Ermotti — Named Interim CEO on Bahnhofstrasse After Grübel Resigned

Oswald Grübel resigned on 24 September 2011. The board did not go outside for a caretaker.

It named Sergio Ermotti, who had joined UBS only that April as chairman and CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as Group CEO on an interim basis.

The announcement went out from Zurich. UBS AG's registered offices are Bahnhofstrasse 45 in Zurich and Aeschenvorstadt 1 in Basel; the Bahnhofstrasse building is the one the bank still photographs as headquarters.

Grübel left after the bank disclosed a loss of about 2.3 billion dollars from unauthorised trading in London. Reuters published the joint staff memo from chairman Kaspar Villiger and Ermotti the same day.

Ermotti had been at the firm for five months. Before that he had been deputy CEO at UniCredit and, for sixteen years, a markets executive at Merrill Lynch.

The board made the appointment permanent on 15 November 2011, after what it called a comprehensive evaluation, and brought forward Axel Weber's arrival as chairman.

That November confirmation is a separate date. This pin is the Saturday he was asked to take the chair while the trading-loss investigation was still open.

CNN later reported that he had been in Singapore with the bank's top brass as EMEA head when the crisis broke. The legal home of the decision was still this address.

Bahnhofstrasse 45 sits on the city's main banking street, a short walk from Paradeplatz. The façade a visitor sees now is the working headquarters, rebuilt and relabelled across mergers, not a 2011 time capsule.

What changed on this date is simple. A Ticinese apprentice who had never run a Swiss universal bank was given the largest one in the country, in public, with the previous CEO gone.

He would keep the job until 1 November 2020. The first day of that run is this one.

Photo: Ank Kumar, UBS headquarters at Bahnhofstrasse 45, Zurich, 20 August 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: UBS Group picture collection, Sergio P. Ermotti, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.