UBS poaches Goldman Sachs veteran to run data lab

UBS has hired a former Goldman Sachs managing director to head up the data lab within its investment bank. Ronald Jansen started at UBS in New York in August.

Jansen spent the last 13 years at Goldman Sachs leading a global team of strats within its investment bank, focusing on M&A, capital markets and derivatives structuring, according to LinkedIn. Goldman named him managing director in 2010.

Jansen’s pre-investment banking background is rather atypical, though maybe not for someone who runs a team of strats. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in engineering as well as a PhD from Yale in bioinformatics – a field that relies on computer science and mathematics to interpret biological data.

After graduating, he spent two years at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center studying signal processing in cells using computational simulations. That’s when Goldman Sachs tapped him to join their investment bank, proving you don’t need a finance degree to be successful there. Being a data scientist with two post-graduate degrees likely helps, however.

UBS has recently made a large investment in alternative research within its investment bank – or corporate client solutions group. Its engineers and analysts took apart an electric car last year, piece-by-piece, just to understand how much it was actually worth, according to a recent Business Insider expose.

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