We talk to experts in the wealth and private banking sector about what they see as the rationale for the NatWest/Evelyn Partners transaction – announced yesterday – and the challenges and lessons for the wider UK sector.

Yesterday’s announcement from NatWest Group that it was buying Evelyn Partners wasn’t a big shock. However, it is a reminder of how important wealth management is to some of the UK’s top lenders.

London-listed NatWest already has a renowned private banking brand – Coutts – but may have thought it needed to scale up wealth management and take a larger market slice. 

Buying Evelyn Partners means that private banking and wealth management at NatWest will make up about 20 per cent of group customer assets and liabilities, diversifying its revenue streams – a point that shareholders may come to appreciate. NatWest reports its full-year 2025 figures on Friday. Rival Barclays is reporting results today: at one point it was said to be a rival for Evelyn's affections.

Investors appeared unimpressed by the £2.7 billion ($3.69 billion) enterprise value price tag that NatWest is paying, and NatWest's stock sold off at about 6 per cent at the close. The purchase price is a multiple of 15 times earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). On the other hand, NatWest’s shares have soared about 67 per cent in the 12 months to yesterday’s close, giving it confidence to execute the deal when banks' shares have generally been on the up.

The deal is not cheap but one that NatWest appears willing to pay to become a top wealth player. The purchase combines Evelyn Partners’ £69 billion of AuMA with the £59 billion AuMA of NatWest Group’s existing private banking and wealth management business. NatWest will oversee more than £127 billion of AuMA and total customer assets and liabilities (CAL) of £188 billion.

Evelyn Partners was bought from funds overseen by private equity (PE) players Permira and Warburg Pincus. This is also a sign of PE owners having become important parts of the wealth sector chessboard in the UK as well as the US. With PE investors hoping to see a return on their investments, the clock was always ticking for the time when these firms would seek an exit.

“I think that this appears to be a good deal for all parties involved. The PE firms have achieved a very healthy return on their investment, Evelyn Partners gets a stable long-term owner, and NatWest becomes the UK’s largest private banking and wealth manager with £127 billion AuMA,” Steve Dyson (pictured below), managing director at Investment & Wealth Management Consultants, told WealthBriefing.

Steve Dyson

“There appears to be a good cross-sell opportunity with NatWest’s circa 20 million banking clients and Evelyn Partners’ financial planning, platform (Bestinvest) and discretionary fund manager and managed portfolio service offerings. For Coutts, this is also the missing `middle ground’ from ultra-high net worth to the mass affluent. It gives NatWest a complete 'wealth funnel’,” Dyson continued.

Evelyn Partners’ arrival at this point has seen it grow by its own inorganic as well as organic routes. Funds advised by Permira originally invested in Bestinvest in 2014 and through a small number of combinations, most notably Tilney, Towry and Smith & Williamson, created and integrated the combined group into Evelyn Partners. Warburg Pincus became a minority investor in the company upon the acquisition of Smith & Williamson in 2020.

As Evelyn fine-tuned its strategy – and engaged brand-promoting ventures such as support for sports – it also simplified its proposition, mindful that this would entice buyers who like a straightforward wealth management firm. For example, in November 2024 Evelyn spun off its professional services business to funds advised by Apax Partners.

Moving the dial

NatWest, given its own position, needed to acquire a business with meaningful scale and AuM to “move the dial in a market that already has lots of players,” Antoine Dupont-Madinier (pictured below), managing director at Lincoln International, an investment bank, told this publication. 

Antoine Dupont-Madinier

There is not a direct clash with what Coutts is doing because Coutts tends to look after high net worth individuals who are higher up the wealth spectrum, whilst Evelyn focuses on the affluent and lower-to-mid HNW segment, with a strong emphasis on financial planning-led wealth management, he said. 

NatWest also wants to buy into the wealth sector to have a different source of revenue and to be less reliant on net interest income.

“I am not surprised. Evelyn Partners had been pursuing an IPO for several years and had grown into a sizeable business, which inevitably narrowed the universe of potential M&A buyers,” Dupont-Madinier continued. This situation partly explains why Evelyn spun off its professional services business, he said. This was designed to make Evelyn a more “pure play” wealth firm and more attractive to buyers.

He said the 15 times multiple paid was “good for the seller and not a cheap acquisition…It is at the high end of the range.”

If Evelyn is treated as a listed company, then the purchase price implied a price/earnings multiple on recent earnings of 25 times, Dupont-Madinier said. 

Back to the future?

“It is a transaction that reinforces NatWest and it is interesting to see how some British banks are going back into wealth management,” Dupont-Madinier said. He made this point to highlight how in countries such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, banks tend to hold a higher share of the overall wealth management sector – as high as 50 per cent in countries such as France – than is the case in the UK.

Handling integration after a takeover is not an easy move. IAWMC’s Dyson argues that the Evelyn Partners team are well-prepared for this because of the way that the group evolved through M&A. 

“Evelyn has plenty of experience gained from integrating Tilney, Bestinvest and Smith & Williamson. Both Evelyn Partners and Coutts have the same core banking and wealth management platform in Avaloq, which could make systems integration smoother,” Dyson said. 

“Challenges will include the difference between a bank culture versus advice culture – advisor and client retention will be key. Bank and wealth management integrations have had issues in the past. We have recently seen Lloyds take back ownership from Schroders of the personal wealth management business which struggled to gain momentum,” Dyson said. (He referred to Lloyds Banking Group taking full ownership of the Schroders Personal Wealth joint venture last October which had originally been composed in 2019.) 

Dyson noted that because Lloyds, Barclays and Royal Bank of Canada were in the running for Evelyn Partners, he thinks there is more acquisition activity to come in the UK wealth management sector.

“There are about 40 active PE firms with stakes in other wealth-related companies noting the 15x EBITDA figure, so watch this space!” Dyson added.

Charlie Ring (pictured below), partner at law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, said the deal is significant on a number of levels. 

“This acquisition underlines how seriously banks are re-entering the advice market. Whilst the 15x EBITDA headline will grab attention," he said. "It reflects scale, quality and bank-specific synergies rather than a blanket reset of valuations. That said, the deal is likely to accelerate consolidation as banks and well-capitalised buyers compete for high-quality advice businesses - with a knock-on effect for mid-market and smaller firms as valuation expectations rise and competitive pressure intensifies.”

Charlie Ring

Domination bid?

"This deal allows Natwest to resume the journey to dominate the wealth space in the UK, but to justify the price on top of a difficult integration challenge it is essential that NatWest remains committed in the longer term and retains a certain entrepreneurial spirit for the acquired client advisors rather than impose a top down procedural bureaucracy," Ray Soudah (pictured below), founder and chairman of MilleniumAssociates, a firm specialising in M&A and strategic advice for financial services, told WB. 

Ray Soudah

An executive search figure, Nick Dogilewski (pictured), who runs Exeter Partners, gave this take on the deal: “If you have an account at Coutts, you’re more than likely to have a manager at Evelyn, so there will be some fallout. 15 times EBITDA is super-strong. The private client market and its consolidation will continue, with the 15x multiple as the benchmark going forward for those who can get it. As we’ve seen with Rathbones, these wealth managers don’t like to stick around, NatWest/Coutts won’t get value for money in this deal, but Permira have played a blinder."

 

Nick Dogilewski

What’s next?
What might other banks do in the UK? “There is not much that is available that can genuinely move the dial,” Lincoln’s Dupont-Madinier said. 

More broadly, a trend of industry consolidation is continuing with a “consolidation of the consolidators,” expected to materialise soon, he said. Many deals tend to be in the region of £10 million to £30 million EBITDA, which can suit a large number of buyers such as PE firms, he said. When the earnings figures are much higher than the risks and work involved in deal-making, it becomes more challenging.

(Editor's note: There is one final observation worth making: NatWest is buying a large wealth management group more than two years after the upheavals associated with the "debanking" saga that led to the departures of the NatWest CEO and Coutts CEO at the time. Since then, new chiefs have taken the helm. NatWest's share price performance during 2025, and into this year, suggests the bank has put that affair well and truly behind it, even if investors appeared a bit queasy yesterday.)