PaineWebber, Warburg Brands Die

UBS, Europe’s largest bank by assets, dropped the PaineWebber and Warburg brands from its brokerage and investment bank Monday, scrapping two of the best-known names on Wall Street and in London.

The move by UBS, based in Zurich, Switzerland, adds PaineWebber and Warburg to the list of names that have been forsaken in a decade of financial services mergers. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Bankers Trust and Alex. Brown Inc. are gone. Morgan Stanley & Co. last year jettisoned Dean Witter. Citigroup Inc. has scrapped Salomon.

When UBS announced in November the decision to drop the names, President Peter Wuffli said, “It was becoming increasingly challenging to differentiate the different brand names, and it created in some constituencies increasing confusion.”

The bank declined to provide the cost of the name change and accompanying advertising campaign, which includes full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times that will run until mid-July.

The PaineWebber brand was among the intangible assets that UBS acquired when it bought the 124-year-old brokerage firm in 2000. The brand was worth $773 million net when it was bought, Wuffli said.

UBS itself was the product of a 1998 merger of Swiss Bank Corp. and Union Bank of Switzerland. London-based merchant bank S.G. Warburg, bought by SBC in 1995, came as part of the deal.

Some analysts said dropping the names would make no difference to the firm.

“It’s more cosmetic,” said Georg Kanders, an analyst at WestLB. “Maybe it has some impact with private clients, but in the institutional business it has no impact.”

Briefly

IPO.com, a 6-year-old Internet venture that tracked equity sales, has shut down, a statement on its Web site said without giving a reason.

David Roberts, co-founder and chief executive of IPO.com, said the Web site was “ceasing publication” in a message that was posted on its Internet site and dated Friday.

A telephone call to the company’s Manhattan office was not answered.