UBS taps Morgan Stanley’s Tom Wipf to help lead Credit Suisse tie-up

Zurich: Tom Wipf, a vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, is departing after almost four decades to join UBS Group.

He will help lead the bank’s effort to integrate Credit Suisse’s operations in the Americas, according to company spokeswoman Erica Chase, after the emergency takeover of UBS’s Swiss rival. Wipf confirmed the move in an interview on Tuesday while declining to provide further details. A representative for Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

An industry stalwart, Wipf first joined Morgan Stanley in 1986 after heading up securities lending at Citi, according to his LinkedIn profile.

More recently, though, he’s become known for leading Wall Street through one of its biggest challenges of the last decade: replacing Libor, after waning underlying liquidity and a fixing scandal prompted regulators to initiate an overhaul.

In 2019, when Wipf took over as chair of the Alternative Reference Rates Committee - a transition-guiding body backed by the Federal Reserve - that benchmark still underpinned trillions of dollars of assets. Now, little remains. Libor will officially sunset on June 30.

Wipf is also leaving the ARRC. The committee last week appointed Peter Phelan, chief administrative officer of the Institutional Client Group in North America at Citigroup, as ARRC chair, effective July 1.