UBS's integration of Credit Suisse clients and data is proceeding according to plan following a successful test migration in Asia, the bank's senior technology executive has confirmed.

Mike Dargan, group chief operations and technology officer at UBS, said that a trial run involving hundreds of Credit Suisse clients from Hong Kong and Singapore was completed successfully in September. "The entire floor was applauding. There were tears," he told Reuters in an interview in Zurich.

The integration represents what Dargan described as "the largest migration of data as part of an M&A transaction in financial services, if not the biggest overall." The Swiss banking giant is set to transfer approximately 1.3 million clients in total, with Luxembourg and Hong Kong migrations scheduled to begin in the coming weeks, followed by Singapore.

The scale of the technical challenge is immense, involving the migration of 110 petabytes of data – with each petabyte equivalent to 500 billion pages of printed text. The bank has already made significant progress, decommissioning roughly 560 applications, 13 petabytes of data, and 40,000 servers from Credit Suisse's infrastructure.

The successful integration is crucial for UBS, with group chief executive officer Sergio Ermotti previously identifying IT integration as one of the biggest risks facing the bank following its emergency rescue of Credit Suisse last year. Any delays could impact the cost savings UBS has committed to achieve.

Dargan, who oversees around 40,000 workers, also announced plans to reduce the number of external contractors while retaining the majority of Credit Suisse's permanent employees. This move will increase the proportion of internal technology and operations staff from 60 per cent to 85 per cent.

Investors have responded positively to the progress of the merger, with UBS shares gaining nearly 56 per cent in value since the takeover announcement in March 2023. The bank expects to complete the full integration by 2026, by which time total headcount could decrease to approximately 90,000, according to media reports.

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