Venetia Lean, board director at Banque Havilland, explains why family connections will help the bank make its mark when marketing to the UHNW segment.

Venetia Lean, board director at Banque Havilland, explains why family connections will help the bank make its mark when marketing to the UHNW segment.

The ultra high net worth client segment is notoriously tricky to reach out to, but one relatively new entrant to this space is leveraging on an advantage that the big global banks groups don’t have at their disposal: the ability to make things a “family affair”.

Luxembourg-based Banque Havilland is noteworthy on several fronts, the main one being that it is family-owned and run. Few wealth management firms (bar the well-known LLPs and multi-family offices) can boast of the same in this day and age and it is here that Banque Havilland can really press its advantage home, explains Venetia Lean, the bank’s chief operating officer and member of the board.

By way of background, Banque Havilland launched in July of 2009 under the stewardship of property tycoon David Rowland, now the bank’s honorary president. While he himself is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the bank, seven of his eight children work within it today, Lean being one of these.

Banque Havilland was of course born at the height of the financial crisis and its genesis owes much to the fact that the patriarch of the family became concerned about the family assets held at the big banks – many of which were forced to take state aid and/or were becoming embroiled in the various scandals which the crisis unearthed. Put simply, in the words of Lean, Banque Havilland was born from the family’s desire to create a private bank that they themselves would like to bank with.

Initially the family looked into applying for a bank licence in Switzerland (a notoriously onerous and expensive process) but eventually took the option of acquiring the banking licence, infrastructure and assets of the former Kaupthing Bank Luxembourg in order to leverage on a ready-made operating infrastructure and experienced teams already in place.

Co-investment

One advantage that firms like the venerable Swiss partnerships have always had over the global banks is that they are able to demonstrate a “skin in the game” approach to investment, and this element of co-investment is also what Banque Havilland sees as one of its key differentiators: selected clients with the corresponding risk appetite are invited to "co-invest" with the Rowland family.

The Rowland family’s investment credentials are in fact pretty impressive and have been built up over 50 years of experience in the finance and investment sector (driven initially through the career of David Rowland).  The first formal incarnation of this investment expertise was the creation of Blackfish Capital Management in 2006 – an investment manager for several Cayman-domiciled investment funds which were formed to follow the investment strategies deployed by the family (the firm also operated a number of managed accounts for several individuals from the family network).

But the family element of Banque Havilland’s offering runs far deeper than just the opportunity to co-invest, explains Lean: it’s about a cultural fit.

“People like people like them”

As the old adage goes, “people like people like them” and this is exactly why Banque Havilland is confident of its appeal to the sort of dynamic, truly global clients it is targeting. The bank’s typical clients are entrepreneurial in character and in Lean’s mind they are drawn to the fact that the Rowlands are self-made and continue to strive for the family’s future prosperity.

“We’re quite a down-to earth family and everybody works pretty hard. I think the reason that people bank with us is that they identify with that, as they’re people who’ve made their own money,” said Lean. “There’s a work ethic; we haven’t just inherited wealth – we’ve made it, we’ve managed it. I think people like that and they want to be part of that.”

As well as this aspect of cultural fit, Lean sees the visibility of the family in promoting the bank as a huge advantage over the global wealth management firms – this is, after all, a “people business” and, when it comes to entrusting your family’s wealth to an institution, personal relationships are absolutely fundamental, in Lean’s view. Moreover, knowing personally those in control of the bank and its strategy can give great comfort to clients particularly in today’s economic climate, she believes.

“If you’re banking with one of the big institutions, then you’re so far removed from the management that if you have a problem how likely is it that you will get access to the CEO or the shareholder,” she asked. “What our clients value is that they can see and touch the people who own the bank and they can influence what happens at the bank to some extent. They can have a conversation with me, one of my brothers or my father and something might actually happen because we’re in here day to day running the business.”

Meet the family

Banque Havilland also rams home its family advantage when it comes to entertaining clients and wooing new prospects by ensuring that whenever possible a family member hosts its hospitality events. The benefits of this are twofold, explains Lean, the first of which is that this gives events the “personal touch”. “We try to make sure that there is a family member hosting all events so it’s not impersonal,” she said.

Moreover, having a family member hosting elevates these events from being merely social gatherings to really being “meetings of minds” where attendees can talk about business and investment strategies, she explains – something which is clearly very important to the extremely cash-rich but extremely time-poor UHNW segment.

“These events are an opportunity to talk about business with the family, with a family that manages its own money, and to get valuable insights. I think clients really appreciate that,” she continued.

Small can be beautiful

When it comes to targeting the UHNW, Banque Havilland is going toe-to-toe with institutions which spend many millions on promoting themselves through sponsorships and putting on lavish hospitality events. As such, it would be easy to assume that the bank is worried about upping its visibility and winning away clients used to being aggressively wooed.

Nothing could be further from the truth, explains Lean.

She concedes that of course Banque Havilland simply doesn’t have a marketing budget like that of the likes of UBS or Santander, which see their logos blazoned on F1 racing cars. But this doesn’t faze her, and in fact she sees big sponsorships as running the risk of being hugely wasteful. Many industry commentators actually feel the same way, particularly in light of the eye-watering figures involved: it is estimated that the average Grand Prix team sponsor­ship price tag is in the region of around $60 million.

As might be expected, Banque Havilland focuses the events side of its marketing on smaller affairs, but this isn’t just the bank making a virtue of necessity, explains Lean. “For us it’s about being quite strategic…we want to keep things small and special and to have an edge,” she said.

Keeping things local

She went on to explain that the events the bank chooses to deploy marketing spend on have to “mean something to us and our clients.” With that in mind, the bank focuses on events close to where its clients are based (it has offices in London and Monaco in addition to Luxembourg), and it therefore leverages the world-famous Monaco Grand Prix for small hospitality events.

Other efforts have included taking the female partners of clients and prospects for an exclusive behind the scenes look at the Paris fashion shows, and a private performance of Puccini’s Tosca at The Grange Park Opera. To give an idea of scale, 20 clients attended the opera event, which was hosted by three family members.

If deploying similar tactics as other institutions can be taken as an indicator of being along the right lines, then Banque Havilland certainly is as Butterfield Private Bank has a remarkably similar events programme. Butterfield was the headline sponsor of Maria Grachvogel’s Spring/Summer 2012 London Fashion Week show and the bank also supported the Stroke Association charity at its annual op­era event, where a performance of Rigoletto was performed at Drapers’ Hall in the City of London.

One further example of Banque Havilland’s preferences is its choice to become season sponsor of Hurtwood Park Polo Club in Surrey (in the southeast of the UK). Here again, personal connections are key since Lean knows the club’s organisers well personally, as is the fact that polo is of course a “natural” choice of sport when targeting the UHNW segment.

In short, Banque Havilland is happy to focus on “discreet, bespoke, small events” even as it faces off with multinational players with huge marketing budgets. In fact, Lean is very confident of her bank’s ability to compete on these terms and is happy to keep things intimate and focused with clients and prospects. “We don’t want to waste any money…we’d rather spend the money on taking clients out for lunch or dinner,” she said.

Shunning big hospitality programmes can be a strategic choice, as well as a budget choice in Lean’s view since a big spend doesn’t necessarily garner big results. She also questions the exclusivity of the big-ticket events: “anyone can do that, where’s the value-add?” she asks.

When it comes to tapping the UHNW segment, in Banque Havilland’s case at least, throwing money at the problem and spending millions on events isn’t the answer. Besides, as Lean quips, “clients would probably rather prefer just to have a coffee and a conversation with my Dad.”