How to prevent poaching of precious personnel
As a private bank, retail bank or wealth manager, you have trained, coached and perfected your client advisers, who have built up strong relationships with their clients. What’s left to worry about? In short, the risk of losing not only those advisers, but the clients with them.
There is no doubt that the relationship structure is very much client-adviser-bank. “They have to have a personal relationship,” says John Kelly, head of Abbey client investment. “That’s the only thing that makes it work.”
At the wealthier end of the market, this rings even truer. As Manoucher Moshtagh Khorasani, assistant vice president at Commerzbank, puts it: “In private banking, relationship management is one of the most important features we should take into consideration.”
They must, then, be worried that rivals could poach their highly trained advisers, and take the clients with them? “Yes, there is always a danger,” Mr Moshtagh Khorasani concedes. “However, we are very customer-orientated and have our own strategies and measures to keep our clients.”
Wealth managers and banks have two lines of defence. One is to try to keep the customers, even when an adviser defects. In advance of this, all-important is the customer-adviser link, banks can try to maintain some kind of direct relationship, and, in particular, ensure that clients do see individuals other than just their lead adviser.
According to Nick Perryman, sales manager for the UK and Jersey at UBS, if an adviser resigns, the bank’s priority is to maintain the continuity of the relationship with clients.
“We have a process where advisers deputise for other advisers on their relationships. As a result, a client will often know at least two or three advisers within the bank. We would immediately appoint one as the lead adviser.”
For Abbey, at the mass affluent end of the market, the process is eased by customers’ brand loyalty. “The advantage we have is that clients tend to come to us because of the bank’s presence, not the individual,” says Mr Kelly. “They are comfortable with the bank’s name. Although there can be some attribution of the customers at the edge, broadly customers stay if we lose the adviser.”
The second line of defence is to prevent the adviser from leaving in the first place. “Being a private banking adviser is a long-term job,” says Mr Moshtagh Khorasani, while Mr Perryman adds: “Our experience globally is that advisers tend to stay a long time with us.”
According to Mr Perryman, UBS keeps advisers by investing, through training opportunities, “in advisers’ long-term careers” and by offering “a positive and ethical working environment”.
