Annabel Bosman is now installed as the head of a team of 20 at Julius Baer, a success story in an era of ‘rapid expansion’ for the private bank. The ex-Deutsche banker does observe, though, that the regulatory landscape is unduly complex: ‘Many clients now find that their experience with their wealth manager has an extra layer of complexity, rather than it being simplified.’
Bosman is determined to make clients’ lives easier in her new role, and aims to assist clients with greater focus on the fundamentals and, most importantly, fine-tune the levels of service. ‘As a subset of the financial sector, if you compare it with an investment bank where it’s more transactional, [wealth management] is a slow burn,’ she says, adding: ‘It’s all about building that trust and building that relationship with a client so that you do get to the crux of what it is that’s important to them, and what they want to develop within that relationship.’
Shifts in regulation over the past five years have surprised Bosman: ‘A lot of banks and wealth managers have taken a “to the letter and beyond” interpretation of the rules.’ It is counterproductive for investors, she says, as it sends service providers towards risk-averse options for clients. ‘The unintended consequence of an uptick in regulations is
that it has taken choices off the table for the investor that it was designed to protect.’
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