Julius Baer Enters Private Banking JV With Italian Firm

Wendy Spires

12 July 2012

Switzerland’s Julius Baer has entered into a private banking joint venture with the Italian wealth and asset manager Kairos, according to Investment Europe.

The new entity, called Kairos Julius Baer, will have €700 million (about £1.1 billion) in assets under management and will be run by Kairos' management team, the report said. Paolo Basilico, chief executive and founder of Kairos, will take the helm of Kairos Julius Baer.

The joint venture will see Kairos acquire Julius Baer SIM (the Swiss firm’s private client office in Milan) with Julius Baer taking a 20 per cent stake in the new firm.

The terms of the deal, which is still subject to regulatory approval, will be reviewed in 2016, after which Julius Baer may up its share, the report continued.

Kairos, which has a headcount of 115 and runs €4.5 billion in assets, has three arms: Kairos Partners (with offices in Milan, Turin and Rome), London-based Kairos Investment Management; and Kairos Asset Management, based in Lugano, Switzerland.

A spokesperson for Julius Baer declined to comment on the report when contacted by WealthBriefing.

In other developments at Julius Baer, last month the firm hired Daniel Vegue Dominguez to head its external asset managers business for Latin America.

Dominguez will join along with his team from Credit Suisse (where they held similar positions) at the start of October. Dominguez will be based in Zurich and report to Roi Yves Tavor, EAM region chief for Latin America, Spain and Israel. The team is believed to have comprised eight professionals.

Julius Baer said that the move underlines its commitment to Latin America as an important growth region for the bank. Latin American EAMs will be serviced out of Zurich, Geneva and locally in Latin America.

The development adds to the group’s presence in the region which includes a strategic participation in GPS, Brazil’s largest independent wealth manager.

In other recent news about Julius Baer, the Swiss bank said in mid-June that it is in talks with the Bank of America Merrill Lynch about a possible purchase of its non-US wealth business. Other banks that have been mentioned in media reports as possible suitors, such as Credit Suisse, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada and Wells Fargo, have not commented about a deal.