As wealth manager KBL renames itself, finews.com spoke to private banking boss Jakob Stott about the Luxembourg boutique's expansion plans – and the mysterious absence of star banker Juerg Zeltner.
KBL European Private Bankers is relabeling itself into Quintet, the Luxembourg-based firm said in an emailed statement on Thursday. The move comes amid the unexplained month-long absence of figurehead Juerg Zeltner. The former head of UBS' private bank, Zeltner took over management at the Qatari-owned wealth manager last year as well as buying a financial stake.
finews.com spoke to wealth management boss Jakob Stott about Zeltner's absence, a soon-to-be concluded acquisition in Switzerland and further expansion plans including the Middle East and Asia.
Jakob Stott, your CEO Juerg Zeltner has been away since early last month. Will he be returning to the bank anytime soon?
We hope and expect so. He has a health issue that requires attention. The best way for him to give it attention was to take a hopefully short leave of absence. It’s a private matter.
How has Juerg Zeltner’s absence affected your business and expansion plans?
Juerg is hugely valuable to this company. All of us are anxiously awaiting his return. Many of our plans have been laid already. That is all being executed, but there's no question that it does have an impact.
«With size comes bureacracy, matrices, internal politics»
However, we have not built this company around one particular individual. We've hired a lot of very senior people and built significant bandwidth in terms of managerial capacity. We've hired a number of relationship managers, client advisers. And we're just going to keep going.
What is KBL – now Quintet’s – strategy in terms of differentiating yourselves from other small to mid-sized wealth firms?
I think it’s possible to be successful even if you're smaller. With size tends to come bureaucracy, complex matrices, perhaps a little bit of internal politics. In being smaller, we're agile and fast to market and have an open product architecture. We also think we can compete by being the smaller bank that really obsesses about client interests.
How do you plan to do so?
By being the firm that sits at the kitchen table on a Friday evening and talks about the things that really matter: Sometimes that's an investment portfolio, family issues or succession planning, the underlying business or philanthropic interests.
«Being a small partnership gives us a long-term advantage»
We think of this as a long-term business that's underpinned by the connections that human beings make with each other that lead to trust and partnership. We think being small gives us an advantage in those areas in particular.
How is that different from what other Europe-based wealth managers are doing?
Everybody talks about clients and client interest, and there's nothing wrong with that. But it cannot just be lip service: you need to really mean it. In our case, it's partly about management being role models, leading by example.
«We don't want a loose affiliation of banks»
We are independent, with a partnership approach to doing business to how we evaluate each other and to how people are in the end compensated. We have introduced our new brand for just that reason, to reflect who we are as a firm, serving as partners with each other and our clients.
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