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How it started
History
UBS was founded in 1862 as the Bank in Winterthur. The Bank in Winterthur came with the movement that founded multiple Suisse Grossbanken (Swiss big banks) that occurred in the latter sector of the 19th century. The name of the bank was derived from the town of Winterthur, which served as Switzerland's industrial hub in the 19th century. By 1854, six private bankers in Basel founded the Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC) to cater to the increasing credit needs of Swiss railroad and manufacturing companies. It formed a private banking syndicate that expanded, aided by Switzerland's international neutrality.
In 1912, the Bank of Winterthur merged with Toggenburger Bank to form the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and grew rapidly after the Banking Law of 1934 codified Swiss banking secrecy. Following decades of market competition between Union Bank of Switzerland and the Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC), the two merged in 1998 to create a single company known solely as "UBS".
The agreement to merge had been made the previous year at a meeting of the Institut International d’Etudes Bancaires, a secretive club for European banking CEOs.
When Union Bank and SBC merged, officials originally wanted to name the merged company the "United Bank of Switzerland," but opted to call it simply UBS because of a name clash with the separate Swiss company United Bank Switzerland – a part of the United Bank Limited's Swiss subsidiary.
UBS is no longer an acronym for Union Bank of Switzerland, but is the company's brand, just like other prominent brands which used to be an abbreviation of a company name. The name 'UBS' came from one of its predecessor firms – the Union Bank of Switzerland. In fact, that was one of the more than 370 financial firms that have, since 1862, become part of today's UBS. Its logo of three keys was carried over from SBC, and stands for the company's values of confidence, security, and discretion.
From Wikipedia’s article on UBS, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3