The LSE Directory / Alternative data
UBS Evidence Lab is the alternative data and primary research arm of UBS Investment Bank, a sell-side team that harvests, cleanses and connects billions of raw data items each month into what UBS calls insight-ready datasets. It operates across 55+ specialised labs covering thousands of companies in 50+ sectors and 30+ countries, drawing on sources such as geolocation, satellite imagery, web scraping, card and transaction data, consumer receipts, surveys and social sentiment. Datasets are distributed to UBS Research analysts internally and, through the UBS Neo platform, to authorised UBS Investment Bank clients. UBS Evidence Lab is explicit that it supplies data and evidence only, not research, investment recommendations or advice. The unit began in 2014 on a question and answer model, in which UBS Research analysts posed investment questions and Evidence Lab's data scientists and subject matter experts answered them with custom datasets. In November 2018 it was spun out of the research division into a standalone business unit, letting it package its data as a direct subscription product for external institutional clients rather than confining findings to conventional research notes. UBS's head of research and Evidence Lab, Juan Luis Perez, has described this as a more evolved model than typical sell-side alternative data operations, which tend to keep such analysis inside published research. The lab's target users are institutional investors, hedge funds and asset managers who hold authorised access through UBS Investment Bank, alongside UBS's own equity research analysts. UBS Evidence Lab was founded by Barry Hurewitz, who now holds the title Group Managing Director, Global Head of Evidence Lab Innovations and Advanced Analytics Solutions at UBS. Report output grew from 74 in the lab's first year to roughly 3,000 a year by 2018, and UBS now states the lab has powered more than 6,000 UBS Research reports in total. The lab has been ranked first by Greenwich Associates in its Alternative Data category. UBS itself is headquartered in Switzerland, and Evidence Lab sits within UBS Investment Bank's global research and advisory operations. As of mid-2026, UBS's own description of the lab highlights newer thematic coverage areas including artificial intelligence, such as developer activity tracking, GPU pricing and data centre exposure, and trade and tariffs, including global trade flows, China export data, maritime shipping and job listings analysis, reflecting the lab's practice of building fresh dataset bundles around active investment debates rather than a fixed, static catalogue.
