Research conducted on behalf of Nedbank Private Wealth has revealed that, six years on from the start of the financial crisis, the safety and security of a bank remains the most important factor for private banking clients, scoring an average of 9.7 out of 10. The research was conducted by the Leadership Factor, the UK’s leading customer survey specialist, and involved a sample of Nedbank Private Wealth’s high net worth private banking clients.
Despite significant measures taken within the industry over the past few years, particularly in the areas of capital adequacy, safety and security remains the most important factor amongst this segment of the market. Other areas of high importance to private banking clients included keeping promises and commitments as well as the quality of their relationship with their private banker, indicating that the personal touch and attentive service are vital to client satisfaction in the wealth management industry today.
Another important finding from Nedbank Private Wealth’s research showed that their own client satisfaction levels remained amongst the highest, as they featured in the top 10% of all businesses in the UK for client satisfaction (the Leadership Factor’s Satisfaction Index™ league table).
Greg Horton, managing director of Nedbank Private Wealth said: “It is very pleasing to know that our clients continue to feel confident in us when world economies continue to struggle to make a full recovery. Throughout this long period of disruption in the financial services sector, we have maintained robust measures to ensure that our clients’ money and investments remain safe at all times. The bank’s low risk model centres around a highly liquid and well capitalised balance sheet. We ensure our clients’ deposit monies are well diversified amongst low risk lending opportunities, the majority of which involve placements with systemically important global banks, and we have never invested our clients’ money in subprime instruments or other such proprietary investments. We treat our clients’ monies as carefully as we would our own and never seek to borrow money from the money markets in order to fund, or gear up risk within, our operations. As a consequence, other than through falling interest rates which are outside of our control, our clients have not been adversely impacted by the turbulent market conditions in which we have operated over the past six years. As an internationally recognised client centred business, we continue to grow from strength to strength with consistent double digit year-on-year increases in our client numbers. In essence, we and our clients support each other for mutual gain, without the need to chase greed or unacceptable levels of risk.”
Nedbank Private Wealth, a multi-award-wining wealth management business, is part of the major international financial services group, Old Mutual, a FTSE100 company, who manages over ?290 billion of funds and serves over 16 million clients worldwide.
