Inside Pictet, the Secretive Swiss Bank for the World’s Richest People
A 215-year-old firm rooted firmly in the past finds tension adapting to the modern world.
By
Marion Halftermeyer
May 11, 2021, 12:01 AM EDT
In the mythology of private banking,
Banque Pictet & Cie SA stands apart. Over the course of more than two centuries, the Swiss institution has discreetly tended to the assets of the very rich, led by a small crop of partners who form the most exclusive men-only club anywhere outside the Vatican.
In its entire history, only 43 individuals — all men, all white — have risen to the rank of Pictet managing partner, creating a bond more enduring than your typical marriage. From their Geneva perch, they oversee more than 600 billion francs ($662 billion) in assets under management and a level of profitability far beyond larger, publicly-listed peers, often rewarding each of them with more than 20 million francs a year.
But in recent years, an unsettling new trend crept into Pictet, cracking the façade of corporate cohesion: key employees began leaving.
Over the course of 2019, a dozen long-tenured relationship managers at the wealth unit departed. Within days in September of that year,
four leading bankers from the team looking after Russian clients handed in their resignations. Bankers for Scandinavia and Israel followed, putting billions in assets under management at stake.
While overall attrition at Pictet Wealth Management stands at an
all-time low of 2.8%, the evacuation of longtime talent has reverberated through the corridors of the five-story modernist headquarters. The departures startled the partners, who viewed the outflow as an assault on an institution priding itself in flat fluctuation. So late in 2019, they gathered in a spartan conference room for what the partners call their salon meeting to learn more about what was behind the defections.
Sitting in tiered formation at the large conference table, much in the same way they congregate several times a week to discuss the order of business, the men heard of tensions, a dispute over restraint and renewal rippling through the bank’s private wealth subsidiary.
“Pictet is in between two worlds,” says Pedro Araujo, a senior researcher at the University of Fribourg, who has studied Switzerland’s elite families. “They are in the old world of Geneva private bankers, and the new world of globalized finance, where they want to be present internationally, they want to grow, they want to present themselves as modern, but not too much.
Two worlds that are on a collision course.”
For all its tradition, Pictet has become more attuned to change in recent years. The company transformed its legal status after the end of banking secrecy in 2014, disclosing more performance metrics as a result. One of its partners,
Rémy Best, had already made his mark revamping the asset-management unit. Next, he turned his attention to the wealth division, long the beating heart of Pictet.
It turned out that
the operation required fresh blood. And the bank found it in
Boris Collardi, who performed one of the most audacious maneuvers in Swiss banking in 2018 when he
abruptly left as CEO of Zurich private-banking nemesis
Julius Baer and decamped to the shores of Lake Geneva to join Pictet.
On the face of it, Collardi is everything that the typical Pictet stakeholder is not. More bonvivant than ascetic financier, Collardi, 46, stands apart as the first outside partner in decades. He also brought serious star power and a dose of bonhomie to the Pictet franchise that values uniformity over individualism, down to the subdued color palette of the partners’ perfectly tailored suits.
During a presentation in February, a cherished Pictet ritual held online for the first time this year, de Planta laid out last year’s key numbers.
The bank was buoyed like many others by the market volatility the pandemic provided — from the boom in investing revenue to a rebound in variable compensation for employees and a record number of assets under management as clients sought safety.
But while the partners spoke at length about performance, charitable efforts or Pictet’s gleaming new building slowly rising on the outskirts of Geneva,
one member from their group remained conspicuously absent: Collardi didn’t speak or show once during the presentation.
Instead,
the man most associated with Pictet’s turbulent last years had slipped into the background.
connecting the dots ......
hmm
