The Swiss banking behemoth has devised a new business strategy based on research it has conducted into better serving its female client base.

UBS Wealth Management is set to deploy a new five-year business model that aims to allow it to better serve female clients while scaling recently-piloted approaches to this clientele across the entire business.

The Swiss banking giant has been testing and developing new ways of serving its female clients for the past two years and will now apply these “learnings” across the organisation, UBS Wealth Management said in a statement. Throughout this period, UBS has conducted research into the gender differences of investors and, according to the new data, female investors could spend as much as $2.3 trillion on impact investing by 2021.

Additionally, UBS's research found that women want to be served with a different dialogue that places greater emphasis on their aspirations as opposed to pure investment outcomes. As a result, the Basel-headquartered bank's wealth management arm has said it will implement a “female gender view in all its standard processes and measure, as a standard, client satisfaction according to gender”. Also, the firm will set up a dedicated advisory board that represents a variety of interests and backgrounds. UBS Wealth Management has said it will continue to make its own workforce more diverse by increasing the ratio of women in management roles from a quarter to a third. 

“Research shows that women are not adequately served by wealth managers today and this represents a huge opportunity. We’re making it a business priority to significantly scale up the changes we’ve piloted across our wealth management business to better serve female clients and are aiming to kick-start long-term change across the financial industry to better serve women. The societal and economic benefits are significant if the industry can get it right,” said Jürg Zeltner, president of UBS Wealth Management.

Meanwhile, a new report by MSCI examining the gender pay gap at an executive level showed that, outside of the US, female chief executives were still typically paid less than their male counterparts. Over the past decade, women heading up US companies, on average, were awarded higher annual total summary pay than men, but ultimately took home lower annual pay packages when gains from the vesting of stock was accounted for. 

Male CEOs in the US were given stock options more often than their female equivalents, according to MSCI's report, and the grants were also worth more on average. Calculating CEOs' pay is more complicated than it would seem due to these underlying pay packages, MSCI said.