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Eric, “Société Générale and market commitment"

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Eric, “Société Générale and market commitment"

Eric is the CEO of SG Hambros, offering wealth management services to wealthy individuals all over the world. He is particularly proud of working for a Group that has a long term market vision.

June 2009

October 2009
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Transcript

My name is Eric Barnett, I work for SG Hambros bank, which is the private banking arm of SG in the UK and I’m the chief executive officer. The subsidiary we work for is involved in providing wealth management services to wealthy individuals, both in the UK and abroad, and I’m responsible for that business. We have subsidiaries also in the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and the Bahamas, and offices both in London and throughout the UK. I think private banking offers very good career opportunities; it’s been quite a hot area within the financial services world for the last 5 years. Private banking is increasingly seen as an attractive industry for people to become involved in. I think it offers a different career profile to some of the other areas that SG is involved in the UK, such as investment banking – by way of example, private bankers tend to have a career profile lasting much longer than those involved in investment banking. SG has invested quite a lot of money and attention in the training of its people within private banking in recent years. We launched last year something called “PRIV-University” which enables private bankers to have a rounded skill-set, both on the technical side and on the soft skills side such as presentation skills, negotiation skills; but both because it makes business sense and also is much more of a regulatory imperative, training has been a key focus of the business in recent years. Also there has been a shortage of private bankers in the industry, so more and more we’ve had to train our own people to supply the demand that we have. It hasn’t been enough to be able to just recruit people externally in the market; we’ve had to consciously think about recruiting good young people and developing them through the ranks to become the private bankers of tomorrow. I think private banking by its very nature tends to lead to quite strong diversity traits; in the UK about half of our business is focused on the domestic UK market, but the other half is totally international, so we have clients around the world, in Asia, in Russia, in Europe, in the Americas, in India. I’m very proud to be working for SG because they have a long term view of our market. They are committed to a market. And one of the things, as somebody who joined SG through an acquisition, one of the things that I’ve seen as part of SG’s culture is that once they have committed to a market, they really are in it for the long term, they don’t back out quickly.