Since late last year, there's been speculation that the UK wealth management firm, created out of the merger of several organisations, was being bought by a large UK bank. NatWest reports its 2025 results on Friday. Its shares softened after the announcement.

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UK-listed NatWest Group said today that it is buying Evelyn Partners, the wealth management group, for £2.7 billion in enterprise value. 

The bank bought the business from funds advised by Permira and Warburg Pincus, it said in a statement this morning.

A purchase of the wealth management group by a major bank had been speculated upon for weeks. 

"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, founder and chairman of MilleniumAssociates, a firm specialising in M&A and strategic advice for financial services, told this publication today.

NatWest said the transaction has created the UK’s “leading private banking and wealth management business,” which will transform its savings and investment offering for its 20 million customers. (NatWest is the parent of Coutts, the private bank.)

“It [the acquisition] accelerates delivery of NatWest Group’s strategy, further diversifying  income by increasing fee income by circa 20 per cent pre-revenue synergies,” the bank said. “It also increases NatWest Group’s exposure to a high growth, capital light segment, with PBWM becoming c 20 per cent of group customer assets and liabilities."

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 now known as Evelyn Partners. With Permira a majority owner, Evelyn's assets under management increased from about £5 billion to £69 billion. Warburg Pincus became a minority investor in the company upon the acquisition of Smith & Williamson in 2020.

By combining Evelyn Partners’ £69 billion of AUMA with the £59 billion AuMA of NatWest Group’s existing private banking and wealth management (PBWM) business,  NatWest Group will oversee more than £127 billion of AUMA and total customer assets and liabilities (CAL) of £188 billion.

Buyback

NatWest also announced that it is buying back £750 million ($1.02 billion) of shares.

"At its heart, this transaction is about putting high-quality financial planning and advice into the hands of many more people – wherever they are on their financial journey," Emma Crystal, CEO, private banking and wealth management, NatWest Group, said in a statement emailed to WealthBriefing. 

"We look forward to working with our Evelyn Partners colleagues, combining our capabilities and expertise to build a leading proposition for clients and customers across the UK," she said. 

Investors appeared not to cheer the the move today, at least not until NatWest's fourth-quarter and 2025 full-year financial results are out on Friday this week. Shares were down by 4.91 per cent around 10:30 GMT; they have risen, however, about 68 per cent in the 12 months to last Friday, a pattern shared by a number of other UK banks. Shares in Barclays, for example, are up 58 per cent over the same 12-month period; for Lloyds Banking Group, they're up 63 per cent, and for HSBC, they have risen far less sharply, up 9.7 per cent, although the other banks rose from a lower base and HSBC is predominantly an Asian bank these days.

The NatWest/Evelyn transaction is expected to be completed by this summer and at this stage the parties involved haven't yet decided whether to retain the "Evelyn" brand or not, WealthBriefing understands. 

Consolidation and focus on wealth

Such a move comes amid continued consolidation in parts of the wealth management sector. Areas such as wealth planning - the kind of topic that Evelyn Partners made an important business area - are ones that banks see as revenue channels amidst a continued need for advice and intergenerational wealth transfer - particularly in the UK as tax burdens rise. NatWest already has its Coutts brand - one that is aimed mainly at the high net worth end of the spectrum. It will be interesting to see how this business will sit alongside Evelyn Partners' capabilities.  

Getting such approaches to work is not straightforward. In October last year, Lloyds Banking Group, one of the main rival lenders to NatWest Group, took full ownership of the Schroders Personal Wealth joint venture that had been originally composed in 2019. HSBC has its private banking and wealth management business in the UK - as well as in fast-growing regions such as Asia, and Barclays has its wealth management and private banking arm division.