Stuart Gulliver, the chief executive HSBC, has rejected Barclays Wealth model and pledged to retain his group’s private bank as a standalone division, the Financial Times has reported.
In May this year, Barclays merged its private banking arm into its retail division, which resulted in an exodus of senior employees from Barclays Wealth.
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The publication quoted Gulliver saying that HSBC’s private banking arm needed to be managed "as a discrete business" in order to retain talent.
"I think it is important to the retention of top-quality private bankers that we don’t subsume [private banking] within a retail banking business, because clearly the nature of the client base and therefore by definition the nature of the staff is quite different," Gulliver said.
"There is logic in having it managed as a discrete business, because the business requires that separate oxygen, that separate culture," he added.
Gulliver, since becoming chief executive of the UK bank in 2011, oversaw a significant reduction in the scale of HSBC Private Bank.
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By GlobalDataHowever, Gulliver denied that the reduction in scale, and HSBC’s recent decision to sell a chunk of its Swiss private banking assets to Liechtenstein’s LGT Group, indicated that its private bank, which accounts for just 3% of HSBC’s profits, is not a priority business line.
"I see the private bank as being a core part of the value proposition of HSBC. I am confident that we can rebuild the private banking business back to one that may exert $1bn to $1.5bn [of profits] per annum," he commented.
