Salamanca Group, the merchant bank and operational risk business, is also an advisor to the wealthy. These three elements are a potent brew, claims the recently-appointed head of its private office.

In the battle to stand apart from the wealth management crowd, one way to do it is combining services and products together in an unusual mix. Salamanca Group, a UK-headquartered merchant bank and operational risk business, is also an advisor to the wealthy. And those three elements are a potent brew, claims the recently-appointed head of its private office.

There cannot be many firms able to put these features under the same roof and it is a combination that appeals, Catherine Grum, who was appointed at Salamanca in the spring of this year, having left Barclays’ wealth and investment arm, told this publication recently.

The mix of businesses means Salamanca has the ability to discuss corporate financing needs with a client, examine risk issues such as cyber security – a red-hot topic at the moment – and the complex wealth advisory needs of clients, she said. This gives the newly-minted private office an edge.

“We would like the private office at Salamanca to be well known in the private wealth industry and well understood. My first ambition is for the office to be a well-understood name and brand in the industry,” Grum said in a telephone call.

So what sort of work is in demand at the moment?

“Two areas at the moment where we get most enquiries are education and finding schools for children as a lot of families are relocating. For us, it is a good opportunity to build a relationship,” Grum said.

A second area of work is cyber security; the firm advises clients on the kind of issues they must consider and helps them to make risk assessments about their security needs. With family offices, for example, the approach to cyber security may have been very different to that of staff inside a company, she said. The recent revelations of a huge hacking breach of JP Morgan – 76 million accounts being affected – is sure to keep this area very high in clients’ minds for some time. (Even persons such as the former head of M15 have commented to this publication about it.)

The creation of the office that she leads followed Salamanca’s acquisition of the trust and fiduciary business earlier in 2014 from Investec Bank. As the firm explains, the private office “refocuses and enhances the firm’s offering for wealthy individuals and their families. The existing trust and fiduciary business and the private client services business (which offers education advisory, lifestyle management, marine services, property management and security services in-house) will both be within this new division”.

Besides the private office, other recent developments have been the appointment of Craig Hallam to the newly created post of head of property services (he formerly was business development director at LSL Property Services); Rory Innes as head of cyber security (he joined from Dell SecureWorks, part of Dell Inc), and the appointment of Paul Douglas as managing director of Salamanca Group Trust & Fiduciary, Jersey (he previously worked at Salamanca in Switzerland.) The firm regularly comments on issues of the day: in an eclectic mix, its media citations pages shows it has talked about issues ranging from political risks to super-yachts. Salamanca Group is 12 years old. The Salamanca Capital firm started in the merchant banking field in that year, while a separate risk management entity was created in 2005 and they joined together to form Salamanca Group in 2013.

High-level
“We want to develop a real high-quality relationship with clients and are not about tremendous scale,” she said, when asked if the firm aimed to reach any kind of asset or other financial target. The fiduciary services sector has had to contend with rising costs like other parts of the financial sector. Grum pointed out that it is important to understand what Salamanca doesn’t do as well as it what it does: the private office doesn’t give advice on investments and tax.

One of the office’s tasks is working with clients when the latter are choosing managers and have to understand the process of making such a choice, she said. An issue is that since 2008 clients have lost a lot of trust in investment/financial services, she said.

Grum comes to her present job with a background as a private client lawyer; she worked for six years at Allen & Overy. She later spent around five years at Barclays Wealth – as it was then known – and headed its wealth advisory arm for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She gained a lot of experience in doing work with family offices.

The team she works in is pretty substantial. Out of the total Salamanca payroll of 275 people, around 140 work in the private office. The private office has a presence in Jersey, Geneva, Mauritius and South Africa. The group has a total of 17 offices, including London.

There is a wide footprint already and clearly much to do. What of the future? “We cover Russia, the Middle East Europe and Africa. There are no immediate plans for Asia but the potential there is clearly huge,” Grum added.