UBS Cuts Global ESG Staff to 35 as Banks Retreat

UBS is rewiring how it delivers sustainability. Three years into absorbing Credit Suisse, the bank is folding its environmental, social and governance work into the wider business rather than running it from a large standalone office.

The global sustainability team now stands at about 35 people, down from more than 100 in mid-2023, Bloomberg reports, as specialists move into the divisions they support.

"Our ambition to position UBS as a leader in sustainability remains unchanged," a spokesperson says in a statement, describing a plan to embed the work across the group, "avoid duplication" and serve clients "at scale".

What remains reports to Christian Leitz, appointed Chief Sustainability Officer in 2025, who now leads that more integrated model.

Sustainability is "firmly a core business topic, tied to value, risk, competitiveness, and long-term decision-making", Christian writes on LinkedIn, the logic that underpins weaving the work through the bank's divisions.

The retreat is steepest in Asia, where the team has halved from seven to three. The trajectory is hard to miss for anyone building a career on banking’s sustainability track.

Where the cuts fell

The retreat goes well beyond the Asia desk, reaching into nearly every corner of UBS's sustainability operation

• The ESG data team, once around 10 people, is down to a single staffer, with its specialists reassigned across the bank.
• The Sustainability and Impact Institute, a thought-leadership unit, was dismantled in December 2024.
• The social impact and philanthropy team has dropped to about 86 from roughly 150 before the merger, though at least 40 of those staff moved into other roles.

In Asia the named departures included Esther Tsang and Fang Zhu, executive directors in Hong Kong, alongside associate directors Samantha So and Umadevi Dassaye, none of whom would comment.

A sector in retreat

UBS quit the Net-Zero Banking Alliance in 2025, part of an exodus that swept up Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley.

The wider pullback has political roots, with a US conservative backlash against green mandates and a deregulation push turning dedicated ESG teams into a soft target. Goldman Sachs stripped diversity targets from a regulatory filing in 2025, HSBC pushed back its emissions deadlines and Standard Chartered has flagged trouble meeting some climate goals.

UBS, notably, is still hitting its own targets, cutting operational and electricity emissions 48% in 2025 against a 2023 baseline and clearing a US$1bn philanthropy goal early. The ambition survives; the dedicated workforce behind it does not.

The narrowing ESG career

For talent leaders, the lesson is uncomfortable. When restructuring arrives, the sustainability function is among the first to be thinned and the last to be rebuilt, even at the post-merger benchmark the rest of banking watches.

The shift also redraws the career path. UBS is dissolving standalone ESG roles into mainstream finance, treasury and client teams. The future for sustainability specialists now looks less like a department and more like a skill carried into other jobs.

Many of these specialists are being kept, but they are being asked to do their work from inside the business rather than beside it.

The cuts are one strand of a vast post-merger restructuring that has already removed thousands of roles and is running behind its original timetable. ESG simply happens to be the strand cut deepest.