Financial Services
Aligning 18,000+ leaders across 5 continents. In 8 months.
The largest cultural integration programme Explore Performance has ever delivered - and the work that won a Brandon Hall Gold Award.
Brandon Hall Gold
Brandon Hall Gold
Brandon Hall Silver
Best Leadership Development 2025
18,000+
Leaders aligned
5
Continents
150
Workshop sessions
20
EP facilitators
8
Months
The Challenge
How do you use a global corporate merger to strengthen organisational culture and values from the ground up?
The UBS/Credit Suisse merger created one of the largest integration challenges in recent banking history. Beyond the financial complexity sat a fundamental human question: how do you take two distinct corporate cultures - each with deep identity and institutional pride - and build something coherent, shared, and genuinely owned by 18,000 people?
UBS needed a programme that could scale across every market, land consistently regardless of geography, and create real behavioural change - not just awareness. And they needed it done fast.
What EP Did
Define. Introduce. Embed.
Explore Performance designed and delivered a bespoke cultural integration programme using the Define → Introduce → Embed methodology. Starting with C-level interviews and stakeholder engagement to surface the culture UBS wanted to carry forward, EP then built an expedition-based simulation - Charting Your Future - mapped directly to UBS’s defined purpose and behaviours.
Twenty EP facilitators delivered 150 two-hour sessions across the global organisation. Digital follow-on modules and team coaching sustained the behavioural change beyond the live experience - ensuring the programme didn’t just create a good day, but a different way of working.
The Outcome
Swift behavioural change at a scale most providers won’t attempt.
18,000 employees across 5 continents left with a shared language, a common sense of purpose, and individual ownership of the values that would define the unified UBS.
The programme was recognised with a Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Award Gold for Best Learning and Development Programme 2025 - the most rigorous independent assessment in the global L&D industry.
Brandon Hall Gold
Brandon Hall Gold
Brandon Hall Silver
Best Leadership Development Programme 2025
Why This Matters
Into The Unknown - The Tasman Crossing
Deployed within the Charting Your Future: Define, Introduce, Embed framework.
What We Learned
Five principles that emerged from the work. The most important lessons from delivering culture change to 18,000 people.
01
Culture needs active participation, not passive agreement.
Values can be defined by leadership - but it takes everyone’s active participation to embed them within an organisation.
02
Change is the fuel for growth.
By adopting new perspectives, we see clearer paths to success. Organisational change can be a driver for renewed purpose, cohesive action, and a collective growth mindset.
03
Pressure leads to strength.
Teams aren’t just weathering pressure - they’re getting stronger because of it. Anti-fragility is learnable. This programme proved it at scale.
04
Proximity breeds collaboration and trust.
Shared experience - even in a virtual setting - creates the conditions for
genuine collaboration. Shared goals and ambitions follow.
05
New horizons call for exploration and curiosity.
Innovation thrives when we balance risk with opportunity. The merger wasn’t just an operational challenge - it was an invitation to think differently about what UBS could become.