In the sometimes bewildering world of banking services, even big-hitter investment players value having a single “point person” at a bank to deal with, points out JP Morgan, the US giant that recently rolled out a solution group for family offices.

A family office may have had to deal with a number of different bank staff to handle complex needs but a simpler initial approach makes more sense, Samy Dwek, who leads the JP Morgan Family Office Solutions team, told this publication in a recent interview.

“We give family office chief executives and [chief investment officers] a single ‘point person’ to deal across all the lines of business at JP Morgan,” Dwek said.

“Any organization that has multiple lines of business, and where family offices have to go to different lines to create a relationship, that is complicated. They don’t have the time to do that,” he said.

At present, five people work in the EMEA segment of this JP Morgan business. The team can call upon all the resources of the bank’s empire.

The bank recently rolled out a family office solutions group, concentrating on single family offices that have a net worth of more than $500 million in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. The move by the US banking giant is part of a trend of large banks looking to tap into this important client segment. UBS, the Swiss wealth management firm, has a family advisory group, for example. Another example is Citigroup. In March, Société Générale Private Banking has unveiled a new private investment banking service for ultra high net worth entrepreneurs who have a holding company or a family office. In February, Killik & Co, the London-headquartered private client brokerage and wealth management firm, set up a private office for its broad client base in a bid to open out family office-style services to those not necessarily in the uppermost echelons of wealth.

The family office space, covering single and multi-FOs, wields a lot of financial firepower. In London alone, there are said to be as many as 300 SFOs and there could be up to 6,000 around the world. In some regions, such as fast-growing Asia, these institutions have barely started to make a serious impression.

Broad experience

Dwek said his own broad experience in the financial world was a help to him in his current role. He was born and raised in the Manchester area of the UK northwest; he studied at university in the UK, France and Italy (he is fluent in English, French and Italian, a skill that was to be useful in his chosen profession). Almost by accident, he says, he got into the banking world as part of a work experience stint in 1991, working in Milan on a trading floor. Dwek returned to the UK working as a prop desk foreign exchange trader and then came back to Italy in around 1993. In 1999, he moved to Switzerland, working at Republic Bank of New York (later taken over by HSBC). In that role, he worked in the fixed income area.

His JP Morgan career got going in 2000. He started – thanks to his fluency in Italian – in its private bank covering the Italian ultra high net worth clients book, later expanding his “territory” to Turkey, Israel and Greece.

And last year, he moved to focus on the family office client segment at the private bank. And it is clear he enjoys the role.

“I’ve been involved in the creation of businesses in the past and had multi-business expertise during my career,” he said, referring to his experience in asset management, private banking, fixed income, forex and client relationship management.

Banks need to be able to develop their own networks to develop ideas on best practice in the same way that family offices, through their networks, do the same thing, he said.

“There are areas where family offices might not realize that we worked in; this [new development] helps to make our work more visible and more vocal. It makes it fresh and restarts the conversation,” he said.

Examples

Some examples of the kind of work the bank performs illustrate what this new family office unit can achieve, as Dwek explains. In one case, there is a family office with a very conservative approach and fear of inflation. It approached JP Morgan. The bank examined a possible solution via the US leveraged loans market. After nine months of due diligence checks and putting a team of 10 people on the issue to explore the appropriate structures, tax issues, etc, a segregated mandate was arrived at. A large – undisclosed sum – of assets was invested in the leveraged loans market.

In a second example, a family office interested in investing in renewable energy asked for solutions. JP Morgan put the FO in touch with another family to pool their resources and invest in this sector, he said.