A private crisis?
Two big departures have scattered the pigeons in London’s wealth management landscape in recent weeks. First there was news that Camilla Stowell, the highly respected head of private clients at Coutts for nigh on ten years, had walked out of the marble-swathed banking emporium on the Strand to ‘pursue an opportunity outside the group’, apparently after ‘careful consideration’.
Stowell’s move comes just months after Coutts got a new chief executive last July, Emma Crystal, fresh from UBS, where she was in charge of its sustainable finance division.
This departure was followed by the announcement that Oliver Gregson, the boss of JP Morgan’s private bank in the UK, Channel Islands and Ireland for the past eight years, was leaving the Wall Street giant. Gregson will start at Schroders in June as its new CEO of wealth management, with responsibility for Cazenove Capital.
So what’s going on? ‘The real story is a really big structural change in private banking,’ whispers an industry insider, who points to London’s flat IPO market and the UK’s anaemic economic growth. ‘Wealth creation has ground to a halt and that means there’s no new business for private banks. And if you don’t have new business, you have to steal it off other people. But that’s much harder; people are fairly loath to change suppliers.’
Gregson, like Stowell, has an investment background. Whether his successor has a similar hinterland will be revealing. ‘Are these organisations going to be stopped being run by the investment people and start being run by the marketing people?’ asks Hedgehog’s mole. Time will tell…
Cars in their eyes
What is it about billionaires and cars? American-born hospitality magnate and Wolseley Group owner William Heinecke has unveiled his new automotive passion project – a VIP gathering of dozens of Italian supercars at his palatial Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome hotel in April.
Among the starry four-wheeled attractions confirmed for the UBS-sponsored Anantara Concorso Roma is the two-time Le Mans-winning 1963 Ferrari 275 P, formerly owned by the French Ferrari collector Pierre Bardinon. Heinecke, who started his Bangkok-based Minor International empire in 1978, tells Hedgehog that cars have been his passion for as long as he can remember.
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‘To bring together the worlds of hospitality and automobile Italiani in the most dramatic of Roman settings is something I have dreamt of for many years,’ he confides. The mogul hopes this motoring jamboree will be the ‘glamorous debut’ of the recurring Anantara Concorso event. Vroom, vroom!
See also: Driven by design: how car galleries have become the new motoring status symbol]
Royal exchange
The Princess Royal rather surprised the bankers at Arbuthnot Latham when she officially opened its new offices on Finsbury Circus in February. Intriguingly, during her tour by CEO Andrew Salmon and chairman Sir Henry Angest, the Princess revealed an intimate knowledge of the sector.
‘Andrew and Henry were impressed at how lively the conversation around Arbuthnot Latham was,’ murmurs Hedgehog’s discreet insider. ‘The Princess Royal made some very astute comments about the business environment for banks.’ Perhaps she could have a word with Rachel Reeves?
Dead cat pounce?
With a fifth of London’s office space empty and four million square feet expected to become vacant over the next five years, the announcement that JP Morgan was close to agreeing to take 150,000 square feet of One Cabot Square in Canary Wharf will be welcome news to the Qatar Investment Authority and Brookfield Property Partners, owners of Canary Wharf Group. But does the deal mean the beleaguered Wharf is turning a corner – or is it a ‘dead cat bounce’?
‘It’s neither a corner nor a dead cat,’ declares Ed Jackson, Pictet’s UK real estate investing guru, who reckons its future still hangs in the balance – contingent on businesses forcing their employees back to the office. ‘When that cultural shift pivots back – if it does – there’ll be a bigger overall requirement for office space and that will start to make Canary Wharf look more positive.’
It is likely to take years, but the Qataris and Brookfield are patient. ‘They have put so much money in,’ Jackson tells Hedgehog, ‘they won’t let it fail.’
Clean air act
Developer Rigby and Rigby’s new Knightsbridge property – known as Project 089 – is making history. It’s the first residential building anywhere to be awarded ‘platinum’ status by AirRated, an air certification body, for its indoor air quality. ‘The historic “first in the world” certification is a blueprint for the future,’ says the firm.
It’s all achieved seamlessly through filtration systems and airtight seals that ensure the building remains free of any external pollutants – good enough, we’re told, even to keep out nasties like coronavirus. But can you tell the air is any different? Is it like breathing the air in the Swiss Alps?
Alas not, admits architect Mark Cowley, who enthuses: ‘It’s just incredible to know that we are getting that high level of air quality – equivalent almost to a laboratory level or an operating theatre level in terms of quality.’ You can’t knock progress, can you?
VAT’s enough
With VAT hitting school fees, Hedgehog gets word of further woes affecting the sector. Even the international pupils – who often make up 20 per cent of the student body in boarding schools – can’t stomach the cost.
Matthew Jamieson, interim headmaster at Sherborne School (which is sitting pretty with 575 boarders and just 11 per cent of its pupils coming from overseas), tells me: ‘We’re noticing that it’s getting harder for schools to recruit from the usual sources. The overseas market is shifting.’
After Covid, many far-flung families are keener on having their little ones closer to home. What’s more, in recent years leading British private schools have founded around 100 satellite operations around the world (Dulwich College has eight, for instance, while Harrow has seven campuses), and these now offer lower prices and better accessibility than their respective mothership. ‘They are mopping up,’ confides an educationalist.
Expect more scalps among mid-tier boarding schools before long.
[See also: The real cost of a private school education]
The beef is back
Finally, some good news. Wealth management’s favourite restaurant will soon be back. Having ‘temporarily closed’ in 2020 and been reported, variously, to be reopening last year or this May, Simpson’s in the Strand, now under the guiding hand of restaurateur Jeremy King, will be reopening in the summer (nothing more specific just yet).
The beef, Hedgehog is assured, will still be served from the trolley. Let’s hope London’s last grande dame restaurant reopens in time for the Glorious Twelfth.
