External Staff Vetting

As of 1 January 2025, for selected group of countries in the APAC region, UBS amended the source of directorship database search checks in our country specifications.

What’s Changing:

Source/ Tools have been updated to reflect current practices in the following 12 countries:

• Singapore
• Thailand
• Taiwan
• Australia
• China
• Hong Kong
• India
• Japan
• Korea
• Malaysia
• New Zealand
• Philippines

We have also updated the criminal record check requirements in our Monaco country specification to read - Monaco residents only: Self-obtained by the candidate.

In addition to updating/creating the above country specifications, we have amended the following documents which will all be available on our level 2 webpage as of the 19 April 2024.

• Level 2 Staff Vetting Declaration Form
• Process flow diagram and step by step guide

What you need to do?

Please familiarize yourself with the changes and implement them in line with your contractual services and your UBS pre-approved vetting approach.

For new countries, currently it is only possible to onboard to existing CS legal entities. However once UBS legal entities are created, onboardings to these entities will be possible.

As of 1 July 2023, UBS will be implementing the below changes which impact the vetting checks performed by UBS for external staff. Of course, these checks would only be required where legally permissible in the respective country of UBS onboarding.

What’s Changing:

For a select group of countries, UBS will no longer be requiring credit and criminal check for every new joiner. “Enhanced” vetting (where credit and / or criminal checks are required and permissible per local laws and regulations), will only be required for a limited population.

In order to identify the population requiring “enhanced” vetting, we have created a new "Staff Vetting Supplementary form” impacting the following countries:

• Singapore
• Australia
• Switzerland
• Mexico (scheduled for Sept 1st)
• Brazil (scheduled for Sept 1st)
  

In addition to this change we have amended the extra jurisdiction checks from 3 months to 6 months and the country specifications now read - document(s) must cover all the jurisdictions / countries where the candidate has resided, was employed, attended school, or lived more than 6 months over the last 5 years (required address history).

All vetting country specifications have been reviewed and amended to reflect the timing changes and any changes to local laws and will also be available as of the 21^st June 2023.

Improving the vendor contracting and HR onboarding processes

We’d like to make you aware of improvements in how we onboard vendor staff at UBS, starting 29 May 2023. Specifically, Human Resources and Supply Chain have enabled the contracting and HR vetting/onboarding processes to happen in parallel. That means more vendor staff will be able to start services on time, with fewer policy exceptions and start-date moves, and a better overall experience for everyone involved. Here’s what’s changing and what requestors of vendor staff onboardings need to do:

What’s changing

• External staff onboarding requests may now be initiated on a drafted Contract ID and vetting may be initiated as early as six months before the new joiner’s start date (three months in the Americas)
• Vendor staff onboarding requests must be paired with a valid Contract ID - master service agreements and invalid contract IDs (e.g., 999999) are not allowed.
• New joiners can start only after:
  • successful clearance of UBS vetting requirements (or an approved HR exception)
  • our contracting tool (Logistics Platform) reflects a contract status of Published, Draft Amendment, or Pending with a start date on or before the new joiner’s start date
    

If vetting clears earlier than the mandatory lead time, line managers will be notified and may request an earlier start date so long as the contract is active.

What you need to do

• For suppliers who are approved to perform vetting themselves (Level 1), ensure that you identify the staff you need early and start the vetting process immediately.
• For Level 2 suppliers, as soon as a draft contract is recorded in the contracting tool, your UBS business contact should submit the external staff onboarding request in UBS’s GetSet tool so HR can start the vetting and GPN-creation process.
  

We’re doing everything we can to make sure your staff starts when our business needs them. Thanks for your partnership in making this a win-win for everyone involved.

For questions regarding this project, please contact me or your UBS contract manager.

Off the back of the changes communicated below and effective as of the 1st April 2023, we would like to amend our communication with a change for the Americas.

What has changed?

• Pre-start vetting checks may now be started no earlier than 6 months (3 months for Americas) before the UBS start date. 

We have amended our SVD and published a new version our Level 2 Webpage.

In summary there is no change for Americas countries.

As of 1 April 2023, UBS will be implementing the below changes regarding the vetting checks. The purpose of these changes is to allow vetting to start earlier in an effort to complete the vetting prior to the services being expected and to comply with local legal and regulatory changes.

What specifically is changing?

• Pre-start vetting checks may now be started no earlier than 6 months before the UBS start date. Previously UBS allowed 90 days before UBS start date.
• Family relationship check has been re-named to Relatives & Relationship.
• Country Specifications were updated reflecting the timeliness and name changes above.
• The Staff Confidentiality declaration for each region has been updated with some minor changes.

The updated country specifications and Level 2 staff vetting declaration (SVD) form will be available on the Level 2 Supplier webpage.

To simplify and improve the vetting and onboarding process of external staff, we will implement some changes that become effective during January 2023.

During the month of January 2023 our regional vetting teams will be accepting the old version of the forms. As of 1 February 2023, the new forms listed below will be required and old versions of documents will no longer be accepted.

Forms that have been changed

• The Staff Vetting Declaration (SVD) form has been updated with the following improvements:
  • A new Level 2 form was created, which is separate from the Level 1 form.
  • Date fields are now dropdown for the day, month, and year (this will help reduce any confusion when including dates)
  • Work location country and valid Organizational Unit (OU) in the physical location are now required. This will ensure external staff are only onboarded in the countries from where they will provide services
• The Staff Declarations forms relating to confidentiality and related matters (aka Declaration of staff member regarding data protection/ privacy and client confidentiality/bank secrecy obligations) are now region-specific (EMEA including UK, APAC, and the Americas countries) rather than country specific. 
  

We have also made improvements to our Level 2 Webpage. You are now able to select the country of onboarding from the drop-down menu via the Document Library page to easily access all required documents related to your staff onboarding request.

All updated documents are now available via the Document Library page.

Disclaimer – this communication was intended for suppliers which are only based in Monaco. For “global” Level 1 suppliers with Monaco in their country scope there are no changes.

We would like to inform you about some changes that will come into effect as of the 1^st of December 2022.

Currently you have been performing the vetting of all your staff when they are onboarded to UBS. This process has required UBS each year, through our level 1 auditor to perform an audit of a sample of the background checks you have completed to ensure that these checks were inline with UBS vetting requirements in Monaco. This has been challenging as we have identified suppliers where the vetting was not performed correctly and before UBS start date.

What's changing for you?

This has required us to re-evaluate the process in Monaco and we have decided to move all suppliers to our level 2 vetting approach where UBS performs the vetting of each external staff onboarded at UBS. This will mean the following

• All vetting to be completed by UBS (through our approved vetting vendor HireRight)
• All checks will continue to be completed pre-UBS start date
• No audits will be required in the future as vetting is performed by UBS

Please can you support and update and sign the attached level 2 vetting annex and return back to UBS by Friday the 18^th November 2022.

Communication Date: 30 August 2021

We would like to inform you about some country specifications changes that will come into effect as of the 1st of September 2021.

What's changing for you?

No periodic vetting will be required for the following countries:

• Sweden
• Luxembourg and France (Periodic vetting will only apply for staff who move into a regulated role)

For Ireland, a credit check is required for Periodic vetting going forward.

Updates, including the amendments to the Vetting Country Specifications, are available on the Level 2 Supplier Webpage.

• The vetting country specifications for each country have been updated. All country specifications can be found in track changes mode in 'Changes to Country Specification' on the External Staff Vetting webpage for your information only. 
• The revised form (Staff Vetting Declaration Form) will be available on the Supplier webpage in the 'Document library' on the External Staff Vetting webpage as of 20 January. These documents must be used from 20 January 2021 onwards; we will then no longer accept the old forms.
• Due to the fact that staff can only start working at UBS if all vetting checks are successfully completed, you should discuss the start date of your staff with your UBS business contact accordingly and in consideration of the respective lead time for vetting purposes (up to 4 weeks). UBS monitors on a regular basis the completion of the mandatory pre-start checks and will move the planned start date if the checks might not be cleared prior to the anticipated start date. Business contacts will be informed about a change of the start date.

Communication Date: 14 August 2019

On a regular basis, UBS takes the opportunity to review our vetting processes and documentation with an eye towards improvements, simplification, global alignment and compliance with new laws or regulations. With this in mind, we would like to inform you about some vetting changes that will come into effect as of 1st September 2019.

What's changing for you?

For Re-Engagement (if the time between the UBS termination date and new start date of your staff is less than 6 months [less than 90 days in the Americas], and vetting evidence is less than 12 months old and available) the additional two checks need to be re-performed by UBS before a member of staff is rehired/re-engaged:

• External Directorship Self Declaration
• Family Relationship Self Declaration

This change will also be reflected in the updated Staff Vetting Declaration Form, in addition to a question, where we ask you to provide us with the preferred name of your candidate which will help us to perform the UBS background checks.

Updates, including the Staff Declaration Form, will be available on the Level 2 Supplier Webpage as of 1 September 2019 (the effective date of the changes).

Please use the updated form as of 1 September 2019 (old forms will not be accepted).