Biography|Sergio Ermotti — The Apprenticeship Desk at Cornèr Banca on Via Canova

People who meet Sergio Pietro Ermotti as the chief executive of UBS tend to assume the path began at a university and a graduate programme.

It began on Via Canova in Lugano.

Ermotti was born in this Italian-speaking city on 11 May 1960, the son of Italian immigrants; his father already worked at Cornèr Banca.

At fifteen he left school with two other plans in his head: professional football, or a sports-teaching diploma.

Before he turned eighteen he took an apprenticeship at the same private bank where his father was employed, to learn accounting and finance while he decided.

The bank is still there. Cornèr Banca SA keeps its head office at Via Canova 16, a few steps off Piazza della Riforma, the square that has been Lugano's civic room since the nineteenth century.

The street itself is older than the bank. Via Canova once ran as the city's main eastward artery toward Cassarate and Castagnola; the Cornaro family founded the bank here in 1952.

Apprenticeship in the Swiss system is not a summer job. It is a three-year contract that mixes counter work, bookkeeping, and the federal banking-expert diploma that still sits on Swiss CVs as a hard credential.

Munzinger's biographical file places the start of that training at fifteen, at the Lugano seat of the Cornèr group.

What changed him was not the counter. It was the securities desk.

Foreign-exchange and bond trading pulled him off the sports-teacher track. He later told interviewers that plan B stopped being a gymnasium and became a trading book.

He put part of an apprentice wage into a high-yield bond and, when the contract ended, bought a motorbike with what was left.

That is a small-town detail, but it is the one that explains the later career. The man who would run Switzerland's largest bank learned price and risk in a house that still prints its name on Via Canova, not in a London graduate scheme.

From here he moved, in the mid-1980s, to Citibank's Zurich trading floor and then to Merrill Lynch. The Lugano years were not colour. They were the formation.

The building a visitor finds today is a working branch, not a museum. Opening hours are posted. The square at the foot of the street is public.

Stand on Piazza della Riforma and walk the few metres up Via Canova. The bank that trained him is still doing what it did when he was fifteen: taking deposits and teaching clerks how money moves.

Photo: Francesco Sgroi, Piazza della Riforma, Lugano, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: UBS Group picture collection, Sergio P. Ermotti, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.