If the number one Swiss bank has reduced its exposure to hydrocarbons in recent years, Credit Suisse continues to grant significant loans to this sector. In 2022, the latter lent $1.4 billion to the top 100 oil, gas and coal companies to develop fossil fuels, compared to just $86 million for UBS, according to a report published in April by the NGO BankTrack.

Climate advocates are therefore calling for these financial flows to be redirected towards green energies. They are joined by shareholders who wave the economic argument. For them, regulatory obstacles and renewables will cause fossil fuels to lose more and more value, which will eventually no longer be monetizable.

Possible future risks

Concretely, UBS might be exposed in the future to significant losses if it does not abandon fossil fuels.

Before the general assembly of UBS, at the beginning of April, pro-climate demonstrators went so far as to say that the next financial crisis is already programmed. In reality, however, for fossil assets to become “unrecoverable”, political decisions in this direction will be necessary. Banks will therefore have to succeed in anticipating any changes in regulations early enough.

“Apply UBS’s stricter criteria”

Contacted by the RTS, UBS wants to be reassuring and conveys two messages: the bank does not joke with sustainability or with climate risk and its strategy in this area has not changed with the takeover of Credit Suisse. It will be, according to her, “to pool the best capacities of the two banks” – in short, to apply the stricter criteria of UBS to the dirtier portfolio of Credit Suisse.

If this prospect delights some, others believe on the contrary that the immensity of the integration work that awaits UBS with the absorption of the number two Swiss bank risks relegating the climate to the background of priorities.

>> Listen also in La Matinale to the interview with Jean-Pierre Danthine, economist and director of the E4S center:

Guillaume Meyer