UBS On Wednesday it announced a $3 billion buyback program and reported fourth-quarter profit that beat analysts’ expectations.

The Swiss banking giant said it aimed to buy back at least $3 billion of shares in 2026, adding that it aimed to buy back more shares.

Shareholder net profit increased 56% year-on-year to US$1.2 billion in the last three months of this year. That was higher than analysts’ expectations of $919 million.

Overall, its group revenue was $12.1 billion in the final quarter of the year, in line with analysts’ forecasts of $12.1 billion. It was also lower than the US$12.8 billion in the previous quarter and higher than the US$11.6 billion in the same period last year.

Meanwhile, UBS’s common equity (CET) tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of the bank’s solvency, was 14.4% in the fourth quarter, compared with 14.8% in the previous quarter.

Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of Switzerland’s largest bank, said the bank group’s investment assets have now exceeded $7 trillion for the first time.

“We maintain a strong capital position and delivered on our capital return commitments this year, increasing our dividend and complementing share repurchases,” he said in a statement. “We are poised to achieve our 2026 exit rate target and medium-term targets.”

Ermotti, who returned to the helm in 2023 to oversee the government-led emergency takeover of UBS’s troubled Swiss rival, added that the bank had made “tremendous progress” on “one of the most complex integrations in banking history”.

Morningstar senior equity analyst Johann Scholtz said the fourth-quarter earnings were another strong set of results for the bank.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Early Edition Europe” on Wednesday, Scholz said UBS was doing well with the Credit Suisse integration, but warned that the bank’s share price was still “impacted” by Swiss capital requirements rules.