Thursday 25 January 2007

Colourful Clients

A clash in the meeting rooms this morning.

LL, who’s a shit, had a client from the music business in, and he was under the impression that he’d booked the best room. It has a couple of old masters and some very fine walnut furniture, which younger clients are surprisingly taken by. Actually, I’d booked the room (though LL still disputes this) for a meeting with one of my clients, also in the music business.

Huge mess when LL walks in with his client, dressed tastefully in chocolate gabardine and a hundredweight of silver and gold, only to encounter my client, dressed just as tastefully in all-white nylon and a cream baseball cap.

Gabardine and Nylon do not see eye to eye, according to the tabloids. There were some indigestible words exchanged, a well-practised warm-up, and both gentlemen seemed to be enjoying the confrontation, until it dawned on them that this was no club or recording studio but a rather conservative financial institution, the likes of which they would never publicly admit to frequenting. For such clients we have underground parking and a secluded lift, so that no one need know the shameful fact that they are careful with their money. I gather certain brothels have the same arrangements.

Unfortunately for Gabardine and Nylon, they had inadvertently caught each other in flagrante. My client's full portfolio was spread out on the table, and until the interruption he’d been making not a bad fist of understanding the little graphs and pie charts we like to knock up. Nice chap, Nylon, although he turned livid when he realized there was a witness to his financial prudence, especially one who, in his words, had ---ed his momma with a spanner on the piano (this sounded rather more rhythmic and fiery than it’s coming across here).

I tried to point out that both clients were in the same position, and therefore a pact of silence might be invoked, but neither was content with that. LL kept an icy silence as he steered his client out, throwing me a venomous look when neither client was looking.

I’m going to have to give Nylon a fee holiday, I fear.

Monday 15 January 2007

Why life is more expensive

The ONS has released a personal inflation calculator. I wanted to try it out but got defeated, as usual, by the technology. Couldn't make it work. Oh well. I already know my personal inflation is a bloody site higher than 2.7%. Look at what I have to pay for: school fees, petrol, my wife's salon visits, my own restaurant habit, endless decorating and plumbing work, and gas to heat the worst-insulated house in the country. A rough guess would put my inflation rate somewhere around 15%.

Could this be a useful statistic for the next salary negotiation?

Thursday 11 January 2007

Interest Rate Rise

A VERY wealthy client has just been on the phone to me grumbling about the latest quarter of a percent. He has a mortgage, and he's concerned about the increase in interest payments he will face. I think he expects me to do something about it, although exactly what influence he imagines I have with the Bank of England I'm not clear.

It may seems strange that the rich use mortgages, but really it's just a way for them to get hold of more money to invest - at a cost of only a little over five percent (or rather, as of next month, five and a quarter percent). This particular client has an eighteen million quid mortgage (it is a very large house, on a very large estate). Does that make you feel better about yours? As a result of this rate rise, he'll have to fork out an extra £45,000 a year. The pain! The hardship! Of course, if I told you what his pre-tax investment profits were last year, you wouldn't feel quite so sorry for him.

Luckily he didn't notice the immediate fall in the market when the rate rise was announced at noon, or he might have given me grief about that as well. By the time he called there had already been a full recovery (which of course, I did my best to claim credit for).

Anyway, he wants me to find him a cheaper mortgage. I shall of course go through the motions - send him lots of useless offers from other institutions - until he is either convinced that our in-house product remains the best value... or else he is too dazed by all the papers to bother with it any further. What's £45,000 extra a year, after all?

Wednesday 10 January 2007

Confidential or not?

I've been staying away, not writing.

I got nervous, to be honest. Something about that Turin client and his goldfish murders. I have no idea if anyone's actually looked at this blog yet. There's no way to tell how many hits it has had (unfortunate term give the business my Turin client is associated with). But as I've told myself already, there's no way any of my clients is going to find this blog in a million years.

If I’m going to do this, there's no point panicking about clients reading it.

My oldest client, Mrs X, resident in Cornwall, domiciled in the UK, has 14 million quid stashed in Zurich. Undeclared money, in the delicate language of our Swiss cousins. Or rather it was stashed in Zurich, but what with the European Savings Directive, we’ve moved it to Singapore for her to avoid this wretched new withholding tax. It’s making about a million a year in income that Gordon Brown will never get his mitts on.

There. I’ve just committed the gravest sin in the private banking universe. Goldfish indiscretions are nothing to this.

It’s curiously liberating to cross the line.

Sunday 7 January 2007

Le Chiffre

An excursion with my son to the cinema last night. Would you believe, the villain in the new Bond film is a private banker! We're so used to them being oil magnates or silicon chip billionaires - the people on the client side of the private banking desk. I vaguely remember the book from years ago, but only for its torture scene (lovingly recreated in the film, to my son's rapt delight). I had forgotten Le Chiffre was one of us (was he, in the book?) - mostly because I wasn't in this business then.

Further wonders, a key part of the plot was Le Chiffre's attempt to short the stock of an airline company. New Bond, new sophistication. I've tried to explain shorting to any number of Sussex friends over the years and always drawn a blank. But how can you sell shares before you buy them? It doesn't make sense! Now I need only refer them to Casino Royale.

Friday 5 January 2007

What makes Britain rich?

Did anyone see this on TV last night? I rather hoped it might feature lots of new young millionaires in need of a reputable banker, but in fact it was more of a survey of the economy, with Peter Snow looking astonished that agriculture should now account for a smaller hunk of GDP than "finance" (us). I nearly turned off when they interviewed some moron who had remortgaged his house to soup up his car. Fifty thousand quid he'd spent. On brakes and a sound system. Insane. He made some joke about his daughter forgiving his squandering of her inheritance, although I strongly doubt she has.

Anyway, they got to the HNWIs in the second half of the programme. John Caudwell was shown looking very comfortable in his Jacobean mansion, confessing to having made the whole of Stoke-on-Trent "a little bit wealthier". They were trying to get him to say that his wealth must have come at the expense of someone else, but he quite firmly set them right: "wealth creates wealth". Bravo.

They interviewed only one private banker - some Citi fellow I didn't recognize - who cheerfully informed the public that the rich were getting much richer, and you could sense the mental rubbing of hands together as he said it. More clients, more assets - more fees...

But the prize has to go to Felix Dennis (who is apparently spending £250 million to create a new broadleaf forest of 30,000 acres). When asked what the wealthy have in common, he declared that most rich people are "shits".

Good for you, Felix. If any of my clients caught that, I'd love to have seen their faces.

Thursday 4 January 2007

I had a dream last night that my Turin client read this.

I've been feeling edgy all day. Which is ridiculous. There's no way a multi-millionaire Italian grandfather is going to spend his time surfing English blogs, and anyway the internet's a huge huge place. He wouldn't find it in a million years.

Still, I feel rather foolhardy to be doing this at all.

Wednesday 3 January 2007

Email-free Christmas

I'm under something of a black cloud.

Going back to work yesterday, expecting a relatively easy week, I found myself being summoned by the Boss the moment I stepped into the office. It was clear something was wrong, and I had one of those dread headmaster's office moments that one never really leaves behind, made worse by the fact the Boss is younger than me.

It seems a client of mine, a rather successful barrister with a splendid line in consumer product prosecutions, took it into his head over Christmas to buy a house in Dubai. He was out there with family, sunning himself on the beach, when someone suggested acquiring a piece of one of those huge palm islands they're building. Some clever salesman convinced him that if he didn't put the money down there and then, there would never be another house available at such a reasonable price, ever. So this anxious barrister picks up the phone to our office, expecting to find me at my desk on Boxing Day apparently, with an order to liquidate a chunk of his portfolio and speed the winnings to the UAE.

Now feasibly we could have done this for him when the market opened on the 27th. Except that no one who knew anything about his account was in the office until the new year. And what's more, no one could find a home address or phone number for me. As our house is in a valley with absolutely no mobile reception, those diligent worker bees whom my barrister managed to reach on the 26th resorted to email.

This is where the black cloud comes in. No one here, it seems, can credit my protestation that I simply don't check email over the Christmas break. Ever more urgent messages were piling up in my inbox, with me blissfully unaware and attending instead to the fowl drama taking place in the woodburner chimney and the even fouler drama of my children around the Christmas tree. By the 29th, the barrister - who is not a client with whom I can claim to have much rapport - had escalated the matter to a board director who, regrettably, he happens to know. This particular seagull did what all seagulls do from their great height, and unfortunately the Boss caught most of the consequence - at home, on New Year's Eve, just as he was about to go out to some fabulous Notting Hill party.

I spoilt his evening, apparently. Oh yes, and I've lost a client. Luckily he's agreed to remain with the bank, so I'm not in too much trouble, but there's still a certain disbelief all round that I could make it through nine days without email. When I explain to my various colleagues that I don't regard sifting through advertisements for viagra a particularly festive way to spend Christmas, they say things like But what if there's an important message? I would have had a stronger riposte before this debacle.

Anyhow, it will blow over. But I do seem to have cemented the perception in my younger colleagues' minds that I belong to some technological stone age where bankers went about their business in coffee houses and knocked off at a quarter past three. I don't mind being seen as an old-fashioned type - I'm rather proud to be the only banker I know without a Blackberry - but it will become a problem if they start to doubt my competence in assessing, say, hi-tech or media stocks. And I'm going to have to work a bit harder at demonstrating I'm right up to date on the latest funds and instruments (which I fear I'm not, but that's a different matter).

Moral of the story: be prepared to wade through viagra at least every other day.

Monday 1 January 2007

New Year's Resolution

It's been a grey old Christmas, and the family's going through a swill trough of bad feeling because of some misunderstanding over the placement of the angel on the Christmas tree. Two of the dogs are sick, a favourite plate from my college days has been broken (culprit to remain unnamed), and some poor bird has gone and blocked the woodburner chimney, meaning that we are without that comforting glow in the corner of the kitchen until we can find a sweep willing to interrupt his holidays. Saddam has been killed, so Blair and Bush can tell themselves they've achieved something, while in Romania and Bulgaria officious leaflets are apparently being circulated by the Home Office to spoil the EU accession celebrations with grim warnings about work permits and heavy fines. Actually, my sense of gloom stems mostly from the realization that this will be my nineteenth year as banker to the wealthy. One can't help dying a little inside at that thought.

I don't mean I want to get out. It's a stable job, well paid, and pleasant enough most of the time. And anyway, I'm too old to change career now. But something about my work has been bothering me the last few months and I don't know what it is. I've never really reflected much on the job - just got on with the business of making the wealthy even wealthier. Now I find myself trying to grasp at some ill-defined source of unease. My New Year's resolution is to tackle the question head on, and writing a blog seems as good a way as any of doing that.

So this is just a kind of therapy, really, as I don't suppose anyone will read this. A middle-aged banker doesn't have quite the same draw as a London call girl (although we probably share a number of clients). But then, who knows? Above all, people have always been interested in sex and money, and if forced to choose, they usually plump for the latter.

Private bankers – the kind who deign to serve only the very rich – know a lot of secrets. We look a boring lot, but you can’t deny the insides of our heads are interesting places. Rich people tell things to their bankers that doctors and priests won’t hear. Never having been rich myself, I can only guess why they do it. My theory is this: if you’re rich, the thing you care about most is your money; you have to trust someone with it, so you might as well trust that person with everything else (those embarrassing little secrets). Sometimes there are good reasons to confide in a banker, for example if there’s an illegitimate son to provide for that the wife doesn’t know about. But it’s hard to explain the more bizarre revelations.

A few weeks ago, I was required to travel to a certain small village west of Turin so that an ageing patriarch worth ninety million euros could share with me his guilty secret: for twenty years he has been putting vinegar in his favourite daughter’s fish tank. The fish have been dying prematurely, causing the poor girl continuous grief, and the patriarch has no idea why he keeps doing it. He just felt the need to confess to someone. When I asked if he’d like to consider a restructuring of his portfolio, he smiled faintly and told me I could go. A whole day wasted, with nothing to show for it – it’s not like we can charge for our time in this business.

The trouble is, these days we really are the only confessors around. Hardly anyone bothers with a priest, and the Hippocratic oath is difficult to take seriously after the Green Wing. Only private bankers really look like they will keep a secret. That’s the Swiss marketing machine for you. The odd thing is, it seems to work. Occasionally I try to wheedle client gossip out of my colleagues, but they always turn grave and say things like well of course I can’t go into that, now, can I?

Makes you want to explode sometimes, the confidentiality. Some days I long to get up on my desk and yell the truth about that fat bastard in Italy who’s been emotionally torturing his daughter.

Perhaps that’s the real attraction of writing an anonymous blog.