Personal data belonging to 1,320 UBS employees who have lost their jobs at the Swiss banking giant was accidentally exposed in an unencrypted email sent by an outplacement firm, in what has been described as a serious data-protection incident.
UBS confirmed plans to cut around 3,000 jobs in Switzerland as part of the Credit Suisse merger integration, with the bulk of reductions expected through 2026 and into early 2027.
The leak originated with LHH, an outplacement and career-transition firm that is part of the global staffing group Adecco. UBS works with LHH under a program called “Coach,” which supports laid-off employees as they search for new roles.
According to a popular local financial blog, an LHH employee recently sent an email to 499 recipients with an Excel file attached. The spreadsheet contained the first and last names of 1,320 UBS employees who no longer have positions at the bank, along with details of a fitness program LHH offers them, their office locations, and training schedules. All of this was sent unencrypted.
The incident has been independently corroborated. German financial news outlet ad-hoc-news.de reported the same core facts on 1 September 2026, confirming that an “outplacement blunder” exposed the names of 1,320 UBS staff, revealing their redundancy status, via an unencrypted email.
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The severity of the incident prompted LHH to notify Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC). Swiss law requires companies to report data breaches to the federal privacy regulator when there is a high risk to the individuals involved, and this notification signals that LHH itself regarded the leak as serious.
For the UBS staff whose data was exposed, the incident compounds an already difficult situation. They are either already on garden leave or have already left the bank, and now must also contend with the fact that their personal data has been circulating in email inboxes beyond LHH’s control.
LHH told affected individuals that “no passwords, financial information, or other sensitive personal data” were compromised in the breach. UBS, for its part, echoed this characterization, describing the incident as a “one-time human error at LHH” and stating, “We are very sorry.”
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Mass Layoffs Tied To Credit Suisse Integration
The leak lands amid UBS’s ongoing, large-scale restructuring following its takeover of Credit Suisse. The bank has confirmed plans to cut around 3,000 jobs in Switzerland as part of the merger integration, with the bulk of reductions expected through 2026 and into early 2027, and has separately been shifting IT infrastructure work to lower-cost markets such as India.
The scale of the leaked list, 1,320 individuals in a single spreadsheet, offers a rare, concrete glimpse into the size of one batch of departures funneled through UBS’s outplacement program, even though it does not represent the total number of job cuts across the broader Credit Suisse integration.
