UBS Wealth Management names Chief Investment Officer

UBS has announced that Alexander S. Friedman will become UBS Wealth Management’s Chief Investment Officer (CIO), effective March 1, 2011. The move underpins UBS’s commitment to world-class client investment performance.

The CIO office will be charged with overseeing global investment strategy and policy while working closely with other Wealth Management functions, as well as Global Asset Management, and the Investment Bank.

Friedman is a highly experienced financial executive and the former Chief Financial Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Joining him in key roles will be Mona Sutphen, the former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy to U.S. President Barack Obama, who will lead macro analysis, and Mark Haefele, a well-regarded alternative asset manager, who will lead investment analysis. Over time, the group will build out a global team.

The Chief Investment Officer function will focus on wealth protection and optimized financial returns consistent with client objectives. Friedman and his team will be responsible for defining and proposing appropriate investment allocations and strategies and for communicating them across the platform.

The Chief Investment Officer will report to Wealth Management CEO Jürg Zeltner. CEO UBS Wealth Management Jürg Zeltner said: “The creation of the Chief Investment Officer function illustrates our genuine commitment to financial performance for our clients. Friedman, Sutphen and Haefele’s extensive knowledge and complementary skills will be greatly beneficial to our organization and our clients.”
About Alexander S. Friedman

Alexander S. Friedman is the former chief financial officer (CFO) of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a member of the foundation’s management committee. Friedman joined the foundation following Warren Buffett’s historic gift and served as CFO during a period when the foundation more than doubled in size. Friedman also developed the foundation’s strategy to leverage its balance sheet to make investments as well as grants, in support of its mission; he created and managed its 400-million-dollar program-related investment effort, the largest of its kind in philanthropy.

After leaving the Gates Foundation in March 2010, Friedman managed a private investment vehicle, Asymmetry LLC. He has also been a senior advisor to Lazard, the international investment bank, and a senior advisor to the board of directors of Actis, the global emerging markets private equity firm. Friedman is a member of the board of trustees of the Seattle Art Museum, where he is chairman of its investment committee and also served on the investment committee of the Gates-Cambridge Trust. Friedman was a judge of the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Prior to the Gates Foundation, from 2002 until 2007, Friedman worked as an investment banker with Lazard. He also served as a White House Fellow and an assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Defense for special projects in the Clinton Administration.

In 1998, Friedman received a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He received a BA degree from Princeton University in 1993.
About Mona K. Sutphen

Mona K. Sutphen is the former Deputy Chief of Staff of Policy to the 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. She advised the President on a range of U.S. and international policy matters.

Previously, Sutphen was a managing director at Stonebridge International LLC (2001-2008) where she served as a lead client manager for Global 500 corporations providing global macro analysis and strategic advice on business opportunities in emerging markets. Before Stonebridge, she held a senior position at the first Internet-based trading platform for the institutional foreign exchange market, Currenex (2000-2001). Sutphen also was an American diplomat for nearly a decade, serving in various roles covering Asia, Europe and the United Nations. She also served in the Clinton Administration, on the staff of the National Security Council (1998–2000).

Mona Sutphen earned her Bachelor of Arts in international relations in 1989 from Mount Holyoke College and a Masters of Science from the London School of Economics. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a co-author of The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise, Simon and Schuster (2008).
About Mark Haefele

Mark Haefele has been a co-founder, general partner and co-portfolio manager of the Boston-based hedge fund, The Sonic Funds, since 1999. He focused on using bottom-up research to identify misvalued securities and build long-short portfolios.

Haefele also served as a Managing Director of Matrix Capital Management, LLC from 2005 until 2007. In addition, Haefele has been a lecturer at the History Department of Harvard University.

He is a peer-reviewed author and co-editor of Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War. Since 2002, Haefele has been an outside contributor for The Street.com, a well-known financial publication.

Haefele holds a Bachelor’s summa cum laude degree from Princeton University (1993), a Master’s degree from the Australian National University (1996) where he was a Fulbright scholar, as well as a Master’s (1997) and a Ph.D. (2000) degree from Harvard University.