‘This is not a B2B business, this is a human to human business,’ says Duncan MacIntyre, Lombard Odier’s UK CEO. Clients, he says, entrust him with not only their wealth but also their aspirations.
Hired from Coutts to oversee the Swiss private bank’s UK expansion, MacIntyre is proud of the calibre of advisers available compared to 25 years ago. ‘We’re no longer a second cousin – we’re very much sitting at the top table, and that is a very important place for private banking to be,’ he says.
‘We’re 100 per cent dedicated to looking after wealth – that makes us quite distinct,’ he says of his firm. ‘We’re not a business where wealth management is a very small subset of a whole.’