Their plan has been to realise earning potential from private clients through an established player with a familiar face. Having spied a lucrative but unfulfilled market, and with the recent losses in the investment banking industry, the top three or four corporates have spent the past decade buying up smaller, ailing independent private banks. This has created a fissure between the two, now increasingly filled by powerful corporate financial institutions marketing many of their institutional offerings under private client, wealth management or family office labels.

After generations of quiet prosperity, many incumbents now realise that while their business model has stayed the same, private clients have changed. The third millennium has so far been pivotal for the European private banking industry. (Source: Aesop's Fables – The Ant and The Cricket. 'Since you sang like a fool in the summer,' said the ant, 'you better be prepared to dance the winter away!' The ant said to the cricket, 'And what were you doing all summer long, since you weren't gathering grain to eat?' The cricket replied, 'Because I was busy singing I didn't have time for the harvest.' The ant laughed at the cricket's reply, and hid his heaps of grain deeper in the ground. The cricket came to the ant and asked him to share some of his grain.

Time to get busy, says Melanie Sternĭuring the wintertime, an ant was living off the grain that he had stored up for himself during the summer. The European private banking industry is now split between enterprising corporates and smaller, traditional players lack of dynamism has retarded competitive spirit in the latter while the former established its domination. Melanie Stern is Section Editor of Families in Business magazine.

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