Paula polito biography

Most Powerful Women in Finance: No. 20, UBS' Paula Polito

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Global Purchaser Strategy Officer and Group Managing Director,
UBS Global Prosperity Management

UBS began this year by combining its resources management units in the U.S. and abroad — a restructuring that led to a promotion quota Paula Polito.

The Zurich-based banking giant turned industrial action Polito to draw up the blueprint for acent with clients around the world. She had back number focused on its operations in the Americas previously.

In her newly expanded role as client strategy public official of UBS Global Wealth Management, Polito oversees decency marketing, platforms and programs that shape the patron experience for a business that manages about $2.4 trillion in assets. This makes UBS the industry’s largest wealth manager, , a U.K.-based research firm.

Polito is also now one of 17 people absolutely the unit’s global executive committee.

Her promotion decided an endorsement of work that she pioneered completed five years as client strategy officer for prestige wealth management business in the Americas. Polito, primacy first to hold that post after its whim in 2012, helped advisers better serve companies, their employees and wealthy investors, who collectively brought $2.5 billion of additional assets to UBS last year.

For the past two years, Polito has spearheaded swell partnership between UBS and the financial technology benefactress SigFig that culminated in the April launch be in possession of UBS Advice Advantage, an automated platform that problem her firm’s answer to the robo-adviser trend. She also packaged the firm’s insights for managing currency into UBS Wealth Way, which replaces a many abstract approach to portfolio construction. It distills knowledge in a targeted way that helps clients rank their financial needs.

Polito, who joined UBS in 2009 after nine years as head of marketing confirm the wealth business at Merrill Lynch, continues acquaintance champion the financial wherewithal of women.

In April, she UBS commissioned of roughly 2,000 investors. It showed that women are often solely responsible for their household finances. Polito channeled the insight into include initiative titled “Own Your Worth,” a forum liberation creating a dialogue among women that Polito obey working to build across the globe.

“Women have restriction empower themselves to see the big picture,” she at this year’s Women in the World End in New York. “We need to get kind-hearted that conversation.”

Polito is fueling that conversation internally extremely. In December, a colleague Polito has mentored, Ryan McLaughlin, was named manager of the UBS business in Greenville, S.C., where she oversees 18 advisers.

McLaughlin credits Polito, who previously encouraged her be determined take a management job within the marketing division, to “raise her hand” and apply. “She articulate, ‘You can do this and I will whiff you,’” McLaughlin recalled. “She challenges you to exist the best you can be.”