Steven Sun, Who Helped UBS on Bank of China IPO, Dies at 58

(Bloomberg) -- Steven Sun, who headed investment banking for Asia financial institutions at UBS Group AG and helped the company with its role in the $11.2 billion Bank of China Ltd. stock sale, has died. He was 58.

He died Jan. 2 in San Francisco, according to a colleague who asked not to be identified. He had been diagnosed with cancer.

Sun, who served as UBS’s Hong Kong-based chairman of the financial institutions group for investment banking in the region, retired in July for personal reasons. He had rejoined the Zurich-based bank in 2013 after four years of working in similar roles at Standard Chartered Plc and Barclays Plc.

During his first stint at UBS, from 1999 until 2009, Sun served as co-head of the Asian financial institutions group and helped arrange the Bank of China share sale, then the world’s fourth-largest initial public offering.

“All at UBS who knew him deeply regret Steve’s untimely passing,” Matt Hanning, the bank’s Hong Kong-based head of Asia-Pacific investment banking, said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. “Steve lived life to the fullest, always exhibiting kindness, dignity and humor.”

Sun left UBS to join Barclays in Hong Kong after the London-based lender bought most of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s U.S. operations and hired many of that bankrupt bank’s Asia-based employees. In 2012, he moved to Standard Chartered, another U.K.-based lender, as the head of its North Asia financial institutions group based in Hong Kong.

Father’s Business

Steven John Sun was of Taiwanese heritage and raised in the U.S. His father, I-Shuan Sun, was chairman of the Bank of Taiwan, according to Steven Sun’s 1988 wedding announcement in the New York Times. The son attended Phillips Academy, the Andover, Massachusetts, boarding school, and graduated cum laude from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In 1985, he received a Master of Business Administration from Columbia Business School in New York, where he began his career at Merrill Lynch & Co., according to a profile on LinkedIn.com.

After moving to Hong Kong for Merrill, now part of New York-based Bank of America Corp., Sun joined UBS.

Sun was married to the former Nancy Lewin, who retired in 2002 as a Hong Kong-based managing director for Bank of America, according to a profile on the website of her alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The couple had three daughters.

(Updates with father’s banking career in seventh paragraph and wife and children in last paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Cathy Chan in Hong Kong at kchan14@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Marcus Wright at mwright115@bloomberg.net Charles W. Stevens, Darren Boey