Making sense of UBS’s cancelled Wealthfront acquisition

On Friday, UBS announced that it had called off its acquisition of Wealthfront. UBS had been slated to purchase the robo-adviser for $1.4B.

Why should we care?
It’s tempting to interpret the cancelled acquisition as just another fintech fatality due to declining valuations. But UBS shares actually decreased by 1% at the time of the news, the same amount as other European bank shares, suggesting shareholders felt fairly neutral about the scrapped deal or the potential for newly freed up capital to be used for stock buybacks. Instead, according to Bloomberg, the cancelled acquisition might be result of tensions between Colm Kelleher, who became Chairman of UBS in April, and the bank’s CEO, Ralph Hamers. They may disagree over UBS’s tech-development strategy; Hamers had previously billed the Wealthfront acquisition as an opportunity to also acquire human talent, which UBS could then use to improve its products and services across verticals. Kelleher may think that UBS can do a better job attracting the right tech talent on its own—doing so without having to modernize its tech processes via a subsidiary. If that’s the case, we can expect UBS to launch a tech hiring blitz in the coming months, or to conduct smaller, strategic acquisitions of core teams that can solve very specific tech shortcomings.