As the fourth quarter approaches, UBS is widely expected to cut some more costs. If it does, technologists may yet be targeted following the recent departure of Michael Farthing, the Swiss bank’s head of global markets execution technology. It’s cheering, then, that some of UBS’s ex-technologists have quietly been arriving in very big jobs elsewhere.
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Most impressively, Lawrence Booker, who was a former managing director in AI, data and analytics at UBS, before leaving in the wake of the Credit Suisse acquisition in 2023, resurfaced at Goldman Sachs six months ago.
Booker didn’t respond to a request to comment for this article, but after nearly 19 years at UBS in London, a year out focused on Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a brief spell as a director of an AI solutions provider, he’s now a managing director at Goldman Sachs in London, where he’s helping to roll out AI for Goldman’s sales team.
In this role, Booker appears to be working with Chris Churchman, the Goldman Sachs partner and head of Marquee who also formerly worked for UBS. Churchman joined Goldman in 2021 after running FX trading for UBS in the Americas. He’s now chair of the global banking and markets AI working group.
It’s not clear what Farthing intends to do next. He and other UBS technologists could conceivably hit up their former colleagues at Goldman Sachs. Alternatively, Mike Dargan, the former group chief information officer at the Swiss bank, is now chief executive of German fintech N26.
UBS declined to comment for this article. One senior technologist there said life there was highly pressured in the technology team since the merger and that the “brutal” integration of Credit Suisse was combined with an aggressive migration to the cloud.
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