Speaking at the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment Private Wealth Management Conference in London, chief executive of Kleinwort Benson Robert Taylor is reported as saying: "As an industry we lack a code of conduct for private bankers. I don't know how to organise ourselves to do this.

"It should be a basic thing we operate to. Anyone who says they are a private banker or relationship manager says this is what we are signing up to do, a Hippocratic oath maybe.

"As long as there is nothing that unites us, our clients will take a long time to trust us.

"Clients still don't think we do enough to help them avoid losing money.

"The reality is most clients wanted us to do some kind of miracle and predict the market was going to crash and get all their money out.

"We still have somehow not cracked the nut where clients understand we are just managing money to a benchmark which could be up or down and assets have to move that way."