The recently appointed head of the UHNW and family offices unit for UK and EMEA at Barclays Wealth recently explained to this publication how she intends to drive the business forward.

When ultra high net worth people become clients of a private bank, it is not always as obvious as it perhaps should be that one of the greatest resources they can tap into are the firm’s other customers.

And yet a network of clients being served by a wealth management business can be an efficiently managed pool of potential co-investors, business customers and sources of ideas. And that is certainly how things are seen at Barclays Wealth’s UHNW business arm.

This publication recently caught up with Stefanie Drews, head of UHNW and family offices for UK and EMEA, at the firm’s Canary Wharf offices in east London. A much-travelled woman who was appointed in October last year, having spent 12 years at Morgan Stanley, she enthused about her business unit. Her own experience is very international: an upbringing and an education that saw her spend years in southern Italy, Croatia, Kuwait, and later, education at Oxford and Harvard.

She singled out the strategic solutions offering, one of six business lines under her leadership, as a crucial element of her proposition to clients.

“That is my biggest differentiator,” she said. It is a part of the business that funnels advice from the investment banking and corporate banking side to the wealthy clients. “It allows us to have an integrated approach.”

One feature is an investment club, comprising many UHNW clients, who can share ideas and do deals with one another on a confidential basis. Deals are scrutinised and checked by a committee, although the due diligence checks on any deals are the responsibility of clients, not the bank, she said.

There are currently over 30 deals in the pipeline from this “club”, with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity.  Deal sizes vary from £5 million to £100 million, with a “sweet spot” in the region of £20 to £30 million.

Banks of Barclays’s size like to stress the cross-over benefits of having a wealth management business work close with the corporate finance and investment banking side of a bank. Other banks interviewed recently, such as Credit Suisse, are very keen to stress this feature of what they do.

Drews’ business area caters to more than 600 clients, made up individuals and family offices. The segment is one that she describes as a “massive opportunity for us”.

“We want to get these kinds of clients to appreciate the full scope of what we do. It is about optimising our relationship,” she said.

The proposition on offer from her group forms six elements:

Investment solutions;

Advisory/brokerage;

Strategic solutions;

Credit;

Wealth advisory;

Banking.

In the investment solutions segment, Barclays Wealth has about 450 people working in this group. This is a part of the Barclays Wealth overall offering that has historically tended to be in the background but which is an increasingly important area of differentiation. This team provides advice and investment ideas for people in eight languages.

With advisory/brokerage, clients obtain Barclays Capital research, which is passed to family offices. They can get ideas and deals done without having to go through their wealth manager.

The strategic solutions group also gives client access to otherwise hard-to-enter niche investments, such as hedge funds which had been closed to new investments. It also offers co-investment with Barclays Capital, she said. Another area is the real estate side, in which clients can get access to luxury, “trophy asset” commercial and private properties. As for the credit business, it covers all manner of loans, specialist financings, ship and yacht financing, and so forth. Wealth advisory comprises wealth structuring, insurance, trusts. There are over 600 people working in this segment worldwide. The firm does not, however, give tax advice. Finally, with banking, it provides specialist lending and other facilities via an online platform to family office professionals.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. So how much interest has the UHNW business proposition gathered so far?

Some substantial client money – undisclosed – has so far come into this new part of the Barclays Wealth business, said Drews.

“Within four to five years, we want to put at least £450 million of revenue on the board,” she said.

Some 80 per cent of the clients of this BW segment are international, the rest are from the UK. There are around 80 bankers covering this space, with some of that number also serving HNW clients as well.

“We have to understand clients so well that we know what drives their needs. Also, it is about making sure these solutions are at the institutional level. They cannot be ad-hoc or one-off. We feel very comfortable that there is no `key man’ risk,” she said, referring to the dangers of having businesses become too dependent on a “star” banker.

The six elements of the product offerings are very scalable in most respects, she said:  

“It is all about pulling together what we do best in a sometimes difficult-to-serve space. It is a wonderful space to work in, and very complex.”

Sometimes it is claimed that UHNW clients are so demanding as to be very difficult clients to serve either efficiently or profitably. But it is clear from Drews’s own zest for the job and this market segment that Barclays Wealth wants to make a determined run at it.