By Laura Noonan and Olivia Hardy
LONDON (Reuters) - When Sam Molinaro took on the job of shifting unwanted assets for UBS (VX:UBSN) - all 430 billion Swiss francs (280 billion pounds) worth of them - his phone began to ring ceaselessly and his meetings diary filled up fast with potential buyers.
Unfortunately, many of those chasing him left disappointed.
"They thought, 'you're going to be getting rid of these assets, this is great'," recalled Molinaro, former finance chief at U.S. bank Bear Sterns. "But we weren't in a hurry (to sell)."
After the global financial crisis prompted banks and regulators to look again at what constitutes safe capital, many big lenders have been moving trillions of euros of unwanted assets into divisions like the one Molinaro runs.
Some used so-called non core units to house secondary businesses rendered unattractive by restrictive regulation or losses; others set up 'bad banks' and filled them with loss-making loans that were up for sale.
All hoped to recover more money by managing these assets separately, and to woo back nervous investors by painting a clearer picture of what the core bank would look like once its troublesome parts were disposed of.
But as Molinaro's experience shows, internal bank splits have sowed confusion not clarity among investors. Eighteen months into UBS's non core project, Molinaro, who divides his time between New York and London, is still fielding meetings with hedge funds and private equity bidders who think he's trying to get rid of bad assets like "real estate loans in Portugal or Spain".
In reality, he's largely selling derivative contracts and bonds from the fixed income unit UBS announced it was scaling back in October 2012.
"This is not a distressed portfolio of assets that needs to be liquidated," the fifty-six-year old American said from UBS's sprawling offices in the City of London. "We're not taking pennies on the dollar."
Though he is turning away some would-be buyers, Molinaro is nonetheless making progress in reducing his part of UBS's portfolio, something he says is down to having largely healthy assets. The portfolio is down to 190bln Swiss francs, shrinking faster than planned, as Japanese government bonds, European sovereign debt and structured derivatives are offloaded.
DEFINING SUCCESS
Asset buyers aren't the only ones confused about what Molinaro and other bankers with the same titles are doing. Experts say investors too have failed to grasp the finer points of non core units and bad banks.
While this might have been understandable when Molinaro arrived as chief operating officer at UBS in March 2012 - just four of the twenty largest listed banks in the U.S. and Europe had undergone internal splits - it's more puzzling now.
Today, twelve of the world's 20 biggest banks have split themselves in two, placing on average about 10 percent of their assets outside the main bank. The percentage of assets in non core - 20 percent - is second-highest at the UBS, where Molinaro took over the unit's management in February 2013.
Yet a look at relative valuations shows banks that have split unwanted assets off like this are no better in investors' eyes: Figures compiled by SNL Financial & Reuters show no difference in the valuations of large European and U.S. banks who have split themselves in two and peers that haven't.
While proponents of splits say they allow investors to judge the bank's prospects without exceptional losses and discontinued business blurring the picture, evidence that the practice delivers better results is thin on the ground.
An analysis from banking consultancy Tricumen shows that UBS, Deutsche Bank (DE:DBKGn), Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland (L:RBS) shed unwanted assets at the same speed between 2012 and 2014, despite the first two implementing an internal split in late 2012 and the others following a year later.
UBS lauds its non core portfolio as a success, but it has sustained losses in each of the five quarters since it began reporting and had lost 2.5 billion Swiss francs as of 31 March.
Molinaro says that's down to the fact that even healthy positions can cost to exit because the bank buying them wants to earn a return and is sanguine on the definition of success.
"Is it that every last trade is gone? Or is it that you get the RWA (Risk weighted assets) down to a low enough level that it is no longer meaningful?" he asked.
Bigger dividends are the goal of the Swiss bank's efforts, as it focuses almost all its efforts on private banking, from which it hopes to eventually derive more than three-quarters of profits. UBS, which reports the quarter on Tuesday, is within striking distance of a target linked to when it begins paying out at least half of profits to shareholders.
STAFFING CHALLENGE
It's not just the investors that banks with these divisions must woo. Employees moved to the units are often unenthusiastic, given that the more successful they are at their job of shedding the unit's assets, the closer they get to not being needed.
Even Molinaro had mixed feelings.
"I can't say I was eager for it," he said. "But... Whenever you're asked to run something that's clearly strategically important to the bank, you take that opportunity seriously."
Molinaro said he, and colleague Carsten Kengeter, who ran the non core bank in its early months, knew their first task was to "reprogramme" its 250 or so staff.
"You have to get them to realise pretty quickly that they haven't been fired," he said, "(that) in fact they do have a job, and it's an important job."
How long the job will take, however, Molinaro was reluctant to say. But he did hint that he may hand over the reins before the task is over.
"I doubt if I'll be the one turning the lights out," he concluded.
(Reporting By Laura Noonan; Editing by Sophie Walker)