The only senior banker leaving during UBS's restructuring is a woman

When Simona Maellare, UBS's London-based global head of financial sponsors coverage and co-head of the alternative capital group, was promoted to an additional role as co-head of EMEAOneUBS, the bank's cross-selling effort, in March 2025, she gave no sign that she was thinking of leaving soon. 

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Instead, Maellare, who's been at UBS since 2014, proudly proclaimed her new role on LinkedIn. Three months later, she's going. It's not clear where to.

Bloomberg reported Maellare's exit today as part of a restructuring of the investment bank that means the M&A and sponsor advisory business are being combined into a single unit. In a memo seen by eFinancialCareers, Javier Oficialdegui, head of global banking, said Maellare decided to go. 

While Maellaree is leaving, it's understood that Biliana Barboutova, another woman who joined as the EMEA head of financial sponsors from Deutsche Bank last year, is staying. So too are the circa 10 people in her London team, plus US heads of financial sponsors, Max Jutiscz and Diron Jebejian and their considerably larger group of North American sponsors bankers.

Maellare didn't respond to a request to comment on this article. Bloomberg reports that her New York-based co-head of the alternative capital group, Terry Sullivan, who was also global head of the financial institutions group, is staying on as a chairman in FIG. Vik Hebatpuria in New York and Stefanos Papapanagioto in London are becoming the new heads of FIG in his stead. 

With Maellare leaving and Sullivan reverting entirely to FIG, management responsibility for financial sponsors is instead passing to Jeff Hinton and Nestor Paz-Galindo, currently global co-heads of M&A. Together, they will run the new group, combining corporate and sponsor advisory, family office coverage and the private funds group.  

Writing in the memo, Oficialdegui said the new group is aimed at "leveraging our deep expertise in delivering strategic and differentiated advice to our clients" and at increasing the "alignment, intensity of coverage and dialogue to provide holistic strategic and capital markets solutions to our most important clients." To this noble end, UBS has also hired Peter Toal from Barclays as global head of leveraged & debt capital markets, starting in October. Toal will join the 30 or so other bankers UBS has hired from Barclays, including Marco Valla, co-president of the investment bank. 

However, there are some suspicions that the new structure might also be intended to cut costs. UBS's investment bankers have been struggling this year, particularly in the US, where Dealogic says revenues are down to $258m year-to-date, down from over $2bn in 2021. 

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