UBS has appointed Beatriz Martin as Group Chief Operating Officer effective 1 January 2026, the Swiss bank announced in December 2025, bringing to a close Mike Dargan's tenure as Group Chief Operations and Technology Officer, which ended at the close of December 2025. The appointment consolidates operational and technology oversight under a single executive at a critical phase of the bank's effort to integrate the former Credit Suisse business and right-size its combined organisation.
Martin's elevation to the role follows a period in which she held two senior positions within UBS concurrently: Head of Non-Core and Legacy, overseeing the structured wind-down of assets absorbed from the Credit Suisse combination, and President of UBS EMEA, giving her broad visibility across both the balance-sheet reduction programme and the bank's European, Middle Eastern, and African client franchise. That dual vantage point equips her with a set of institutional insights directly relevant to the challenges the COO role will demand.
TECHNOLOGY REPORTING LINE SHIFTS TO MARTIN
A notable structural dimension of the appointment is that the Group Technology function, which previously sat within Dargan's combined operations and technology remit, will move to report directly into Martin in her capacity as COO. The decision signals that UBS intends to maintain tight integration between technology governance and operational delivery rather than separating the two functions at the group executive level. It is a configuration that reflects where the bank's management attention must be focused during an integration of the complexity and scale involved in absorbing Credit Suisse.
Dargan had led operations and technology at UBS since 2018, overseeing substantial investment in the group's infrastructure platforms and, latterly, beginning the intricate work of rationalising the technology estates of two large, complex financial institutions. His departure after seven years in the role marks the end of a chapter and leaves Martin responsible for continuing that technology integration alongside the broader operational agenda. The bank has not announced a separate chief technology officer appointment to replace the function Dargan previously combined.
STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE APPOINTMENT
The timing of Martin's appointment reflects the state of UBS's post-acquisition programme as it enters 2026. Her leadership of the Non-Core and Legacy portfolio has placed her at the centre of one of the most consequential balance-sheet management tasks in European banking since the financial crisis — working through the inherited positions and contingent exposures from Credit Suisse while ensuring that the wind-down occurs in an orderly manner and at acceptable cost to shareholders. Moving her into the COO seat brings that accumulated knowledge of the integration's most complex challenges directly into the bank's day-to-day management structure, where it can inform decisions across technology, operations, and risk governance.
Martin's transition out of the Non-Core and Legacy leadership role, alongside her EMEA presidency, clears space for the bank to appoint successors to those functions while bringing her institutional knowledge of the integration into the COO seat. UBS announced the appointment in mid-December 2025, providing a defined window for transition planning before the 1 January effective date. The structural changes that accompany her appointment, including the realignment of Group Technology reporting lines, take effect alongside the leadership transition, creating a coherent new operating structure for the combined group as it moves further into the integration process. No announcement has been made regarding successors to her previous roles.