UBS investment banking head Andrea Orcel has been appointed chief executive of Santander, replacing Jose Antonio Alvarez Alvarez. He will take up his new position on January 1.
Orcel has been in charge of UBS’s investment bank for nearly six years, presiding over significant changes in the business that saw it focus on less capital intensive activities such as advisory and equities trading.
Before UBS he was at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a number of senior roles, including advising Santander.
Orcel will leave UBS at the end of this month and be replaced by Piero Novelli and Robert Karofsky, who will become co-presidents of the investment bank, with seats on the executive board.
Novelli will focus on the advisory and underwriting side of the business, known as corporate client solutions, and Karofsky on the trading business, called investor client services.
Novelli is already executive chair of CCS and was previously global head of advisory and before that chairman of global M&A. He joined in 2013 from Nomura but had previously spent five years at UBS from 2004 to 2009.
Karofsky is currently global head of equities. He joined the firm in 2014 from AllianceBernstein and had previously been co-head of global equities at Deutsche Bank.
At Santander, Alvarez will become vice chairman, replacing Rodrigo Echenique Gordillo, who told the board he intended to resign on June 25.