Deutsche PWM staffs up with an eye to integration

Thomas Coyle

22 August 2006

Wanted: private bankers who can lead all-points charges on the wealth front. Deutsche Bank is pulling in private-banking talent to support its ambition of making its U.S. Private Wealth Management (PWM) group "the leading fully integrated" private bank.

To that end the Frankfurt, Germany-based megabank has made former Bank of America private banker Mark Chiappara a managing director with PWM, where he'll focus on ultra-high-net-worth clients and "select institutions" in the U.S. Based in New York, he'll report to Patrick Campion, Deutsche's head of U.S. private banking.

More or less

Definitions of "ultra high net worth" vary. The World Wealth Report, an annual study of the global high-net-worth market by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, uses the term to refer to those with financial assets worth $30 million or more.

At Deutsche, however, the term "ultra high net worth" is used to describe private clients with more than $5 million in investable assets, says Deutsche PWM spokeswoman Mayura Hooper. In the World Wealth Report lexicon clients with $5 million to $30 million in financial assets inhabit the "mid-tier wealth band."

Conflicting definitions aside, Deutsche sees Chiappara as "one of the leading private bankers in the country," according to Thomas Bowers, head of PWM in the U.S. Chiappara's standing is due in Bower's eyes to his "tremendous skill set and extensive banking experience, particularly relating to capital markets and structured lending."

Prior to his time at Bank of America's private bank, Chiappara was an investment banker with Lehman Brothers. Before that he was a derivatives specialist with Goldman Sachs. "We expect Mark who holds the pole position with regard to clients."

In other words, some of the big-name firms' efforts -- Merrill's "Total Merrill" approach and Citigroup's moves to strengthen ties between its top retail brokers and its private bankers, for example -- put teeth into their talk about "holistic" and seamless wealth-management offerings.

Advances in technology are also easing the way to integrating wealth-related products and services, says Seivert. "Better reporting is making it possible for more people at a firm to be part of a 'global relationship' with the client -- one that's actually reasonable from the client's perspective."

Whatever cultural or technological snags big-name financial-service companies may be hitting on their way to getting wealth-management products and services to well-off clients as efficiently and congenially as possible, Seivert says he's a bit surprised to see so many of them putting genuine effort into the attempt. "A few years ago it seemed as though the high-net-worth movement was just a banner change," he says. "And though that may have been the case at first, the label change has Wall Street firms trying to live up to the meaning of wealth management and trying to deliver on it." -FWR