Few assignments in modern investment banking have been as demanding as the one handed to Gaetano Bassolino in 2023: absorb Credit Suisse’s Asia-Pacific franchise. Apac was where the collapsed bank ran deepest – its oldest relationships and its largest concentration of dealmakers. The task meant retaining clients, integrating rival cultures and competing against Wall Street houses carrying no such burden. In 2025, UBS delivered the strongest Apac results in its history – which is why Bassolino is Euromoney’s inaugural investment banker of the year for Asia.
The backdrop made the achievement ever more striking. Asia-Pacific ex-Japan investment banking fees climbed 19% in 2025 to an estimated $24.9 billion, according to LSEG’s full-year review – with ECM underwriting fees surging 45% and completed M&A advisory fees up 43%. It was a year in which every credible franchise in the region grew.
UBS did far more than grow. Its Asia-Pacific ex-Japan fee income rose more than 70% year-on-year, with regional wallet share expanding to 2.4% from 1.7% – among the sharpest share gains of any international bank in the region. In Asian equity and equity-linked capital markets, UBS’s market share rose by 200 basis points to 6.4%; in equity-linked specifically, the bank commanded a 9.8% share in one of the busiest convertible years on record. And UBS finished 2025 among the most active M&A advisers in Asia-Pacific by deal count, sustaining the volume leadership it established across the region in 2024, according to Dealogic data.
With UBS and Credit Suisse coming together, we have organically enhanced our business and used that to capitalise, invest and reinforce our presence in every market in Asia
Gaetano Bassolino
Bassolino’s career prepared him well for the task. He joined UBS as a graduate trainee in debt capital markets in London in 2000 and has never left the firm, clocking up a quarter-century spanning DCM leadership, fixed income sales and EMEA solutions before his move to Hong Kong in 2015. He took charge of all Asia-Pacific capital markets products in 2018 and became head of global banking for the region in January 2020, a role he now shares with Greg Peirce. That product breadth – debt, equity, derivatives, solutions – is exactly what the post-merger franchise required: a leader who understood every part of the machine he was rebuilding.
The 2025 mandate list demonstrates the breadth of the rebuilt platform. In the Philippines, UBS was sole adviser to Metro Pacific Investments on the $510 million sale of a half-stake in Philippine Coastal Storage & Pipeline in March, then brought the Maynilad IPO to market for the same parent in October – advisory and ECM working in sequence for a single client relationship.
In private capital, it advised Yinson Production on a $1 billion redeemable convertible preference share raise that drew in investors including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. And in a landmark year for Asian equity-linked issuance, UBS led converts for China Pacific Insurance and Bilibili, an Alibaba exchangeable into Alibaba Health, and structured trades including Miniso’s convertible with a call-spread overlay and Chow Tai Fook’s with a concurrent buyback – evidence of a franchise winning on innovation, not just distribution.
Integration integral
What distinguishes Bassolino’s achievement, however, is not the deal list but the integration behind it. “The diversity of our business is well reflected in our footprint, while the quality of our business has definitely been enhanced thanks to the Credit Suisse integration across multiple touch points,” he told Euromoney in 2025.
“In 2023, clients were interested in how the acquisition could change our approach – for example around execution and origination – but are now seeing the results come to fruition.”
Where rivals predicted attrition and client flight, UBS’s Asia-Pacific banking business emerged with its combined footprint intact, its client roster broadened and a structural advantage no pure-play rival can replicate: a world-leading wealth management franchise acting as an origination and distribution engine alongside the investment bank.
Bassolino is clear about the ambition that performance serves. “With UBS and Credit Suisse coming together, we have organically enhanced our business and used that to capitalise, invest and reinforce our presence in every market in Asia,” he said back in 2025. “We can offer more to clients, and we have the conviction and desire to be the strongest international investment bank in every location in which we operate.”
In 2025, in highly challenging circumstances, Bassolino and his team turned that conviction into the strongest regional performance in the firm’s history.
