Qatar-Owned Quintet Builds Family Office Unit With Key Hires

Qatar-Owned Quintet Builds Out Family-Office Unit With Key Hires

27 Oct 2020, 04:52 PM IST

(Bloomberg) -- Qatar-owned Quintet Private Bank SA has made key hires from rival banks as it builds out a business to manage the family wealth of entrepreneurs.

The Luxembourg-based group said it hired Cindy Eicher from JPMorgan’s Swiss wealth management business to co-head its Family Investment Office in Switzerland. It also brought in Raphael Drescher from Deutsche Bank AG to head the U.K. Family Investment Office and added three other heads of markets heads since last year, according to a bank spokesman.

The lender’s team of eight bankers plans to win business from active entrepreneurs with family wealth ranging in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, according to Philip Higson, head of the Family-Investment Office. Quintet plans to attract clients by offering investments in pre-IPO companies in the technology and healthcare sectors, setting the mid-sized bank apart from larger peers that only offer those services a narrower range of super-rich clients, he said.

The bank is owned by Precision Capital, a Luxembourg holding company representing some members of Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family. Jakob Stott took over as chief executive officer from Juerg Zeltner, the former UBS Group AG executive who died earlier this year. Under Stott, the bank is now seeking to simplify and reduce costs at its network of wealth-management businesses across Europe, including InsingerGilissen in the Netherlands and Brown Shipley in the U.K.

Since acquiring Quintet in 2012 for about 1 billion euros ($1.2 billion), Precision Capital has injected over 300 million euros of capital, and earlier this month issued 125 million euros of additional tier-1 notes to fund its expansion, according to a company statement.

Quintet Private Bank, founded in 1949, operates in 50 cities across Europe. The Qatari group agreed to buy the business, formerly known as KBL, in late 2011 from Belgian bank KBC. The sale was part of a restructuring plan for the bank after it received state aid.