UBS may slash 10,000 jobs worldwide as Credit Suisse deal triggers deeper cost purge

Layoffs could impact roles in Switzerland and overseas as the bank pushes deeper cost savings after its 2023 rescue takeover of Credit Suisse.

UBS may eliminate up to 10,000 jobs by 2027 as part of its ongoing integration of Credit Suisse, Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick reported on Sunday. The potential cuts would target employees in Switzerland and overseas.

A reduction of this scale would translate into roughly a 9 percent cut from UBS’s workforce, which stood at about 110,000 employees at the end of 2024.

UBS did not confirm the figure. In a response to the report, the bank said it would “keep the number of job cuts in Switzerland and globally as low as possible.”

The cuts are tied directly to UBS’s cost-reduction programme following its 2023 takeover of Credit Suisse after the latter’s collapse.

“The role reductions will take place over the course of several years and will be mostly achieved through natural attrition, early retirement, internal mobility and inhousing of external roles,” UBS said in comments to SonntagsBlick.

For Switzerland specifically, UBS reiterated that it expects around 3,000 redundancies as part of the integration process, a figure it said remains unchanged.

The merged bank employed around 119,100 people in mid-2023. By the end of September 2025, the headcount had fallen to 104,427, a net decline of about 15,000 roles, according to SonntagsBlick.

On average, UBS has been cutting roughly 1,250 positions each quarter. Over the next four to five quarters, further waves amounting to up to 2,000 additional job cuts are expected, depending on how the integration progresses.

UBS completed its emergency takeover of Credit Suisse in 2023, creating a Swiss banking giant with nearly $1.7 trillion in assets in the largest global bank tie-up since the 2008 financial crisis, according to CNN.

The deal brought Credit Suisse’s 167-year history to an abrupt end, dealing a reputational blow to Switzerland’s standing as a bastion of financial stability and triggering prolonged uncertainty for employees across both institutions.

This latest round of potential cuts marks a second phase of workforce pruning, moving beyond immediate post-merger overlap into deeper structural consolidation. The earlier 15,000 job reductions were driven largely by duplicative roles. The next phase is expected to target core operations, signalling that the cost pressures from absorbing Credit Suisse are proving more persistent than initially projected.