Swiss banking giant UBS could shed a third of its staff over the next decade as dramatic technological changes help it streamline operations, its chief told Bloomberg in an interview published on Tuesday. "We see a lot of contraction in the number of people in our industry," UBS chief executive Sergio Ermotti said in the interview, acknowledging that a large share of the bank's nearly 95,000 employees and contractors could eventually become redundant.
"You can have 30 percent less," he said, pointing out that technological changes would make banking operations "faster - much more efficient, proficient," allowing a single banker to double his or her client load. The change, he said, would not happen all at once.