Speakers
Norman Villamin
Group Chief Strategist
Norman Villamin joined UBP in November 2015 as Head of Investment Services and Treasury & Trading of UBP Zurich, shortly after which he was appointed Chief Investment Officer (CIO), Wealth Management. In 2023, he assumed the global role of Group Chief Strategist in which he is responsible for elaborating the Bank’s long-term investment strategy and developing investment convictions for the Bank’s Global Investment Committee.
Norman has over 20 years of experience managing wealth both on an advisory and a discretionary basis. He was previously Chief Investment Officer for Coutts International, Head of Investment Analysis & Advice for Citi Private Bank in the Asia-Pacific, Head of Asia-Pacific Research for HSBC as well as Head of Asia-Pacific Strategy for Morgan Stanley based in Hong Kong and Singapore.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan and a master’s in Business Administration from the University of Chicago.
Thomas Christiansen
Head of Emerging Markets Fixed Income
Thomas has nearly twenty years’ experience in portfolio management specialising in emerging market (EM) debt.
He rejoined UBP in 2025 to take charge of the management of EM fixed income investments after two and a half years at Ashmore as a hard-currency EM debt fund manager, and chair of the Blended Debt investment committee. This followed his first, five-year stint at UBP, where he was head of Sovereign and Frontier debt. Before that he was with Nordea Asset Management, where he led the launch of their hard-currency EM debt strategy. This was preceded by a decade at BlackRock Financial Management, his last post there being EM debt portfolio manager co-managing the sovereign debt portfolios. He was also a founding member of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the firm’s global investment research and knowledge-sharing platform.
Thomas holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics from New York University.