Butterfield Winds Down UK Private Bank, Says Hasn't Reached Sufficient Scale

Tom Burroughes

16 February 2016

, the Bermuda-based financial service group which recently bought a business in that jurisdiction from HSBC, is shutting its UK-based private bank, saying it hasn’t achieved the scale of business in London to fit with its international strategy.

In a filing with the Bermuda Stock Exchange this week, the Bank of NT Butterfield & Son Limited said it “has commenced an orderly wind-down of the deposit-taking and investment management businesses of its wholly-owned London subsidiary, Butterfield Bank (UK) Limited”.

The Butterfield Group will maintain a mortgage lending business in the UK, subject to regulatory approval, it said.

The group wants to focus on markets where “it has a substantial presence and can achieve economies of scale” and has made acquisitions in Guernsey, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, but it hasn’t achieved the scale needed in London to be consistent with its strategy.

“Butterfield Private Bank is fully funded to return all investments and cash balances to clients and has worked with its regulators to formulate a plan for doing so in an efficient and orderly way,” it said.

Last October, HSBC agreed to sell its Bermuda-based private banking and trust businesses to The Bank of Butterfield & Sons.

In November 2012, Butterfield Private Bank appointed Kim Hillier to what was the newly-created role of European head of private banking and she left two years later, and is now a senior executive at an international family office. (See an interview with Hillier here.)

The banking group is due to issue full-year and Q4 2015 results later in February. In its Q3 2015 results, it said that for the UK, net income before gains/losses was a loss of B$984,000 ($984,000), against a total gain of B$27.725 million.