FT称意大利私人银行争抢高净值客户经理推高获客成本

The bankers cashing in on Italy’s wealth boom
Alberica Brivio Sforza, the head of private banking at Lombard Odier in Italy, had been in negotiations for months with a small group of bankers catering to ultra-high-net-worth clients.
But just as she was nearing a deal to poach them from Italian rival Mediobanca, another lender stepped in with an offer they could not refuse.
BNP Paribas offered the bankers a contract that paid them a percentage of the assets they brought to the bank upfront as well as awarding them a large portion of their future revenues — an agreement that could easily reach into the tens of millions of euros.
“For these guys it’s the cash-in of their lives,” said Sforza. “They’re basically crystallising all that they’ve worked on in one go by cashing in millions and millions on day one.”
Private banks in Italy are locked in a war for talent that is allowing bankers to command upfront payments previously unheard of in the ultra-high-net-worth market, with billions of dollars in assets up for grabs for those institutions willing to pay.
To compete they are paying anywhere from 1 to 3 per cent of the assets a banker oversees, plus about half of the future revenue the portfolio generates.
Locally these are known as tied-agent contracts. But while “promotori finanziari” have long been a common feature in Italy’s mass affluent market, working for the likes of Banca Generali and Intesa Sanpaolo’s Fideuram, they were rarely seen in the higher-end market of private banking until recently.
Tied agent contracts allow bankers to work as self-employed advisers affiliated with a single institution rather than as employees and to be offered an upfront payment for moving clients over. Bankers generally agree to remain between three and five years or repay part of the signing package if they leave early.
The creep of tied agents into the ultra-high-net-worth market over the past two years has sown divisions in the relatively buttoned-up world of Italian private banking.
It is increasingly seen as an aggressive recruitment tactic that executives predict will prove costly but are struggling to avoid.
“These banks are literally buying books. They are saying I will pay you a percentage of the asset that you transfer in the first year, which we have never done and will never do,” said a senior executive at a large wealth management firm. “I think it will backfire big time.”
The fierce competition for private bankers traces back to the Eurozone crisis of 2012 and a seminal speech by then-ECB president Mario Draghi, who pledged to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro.
Those three words marked a turning point for heavily indebted European nations such as Italy and Spain and reassured international investors that member states would not be allowed to “fall off a cliff”, in the words of one senior private banking executive.
It also helped trigger the wave of private equity cash that has poured into Italy since.
“From 2012 to basically today, we have seen a very active market for acquisition by private equity in Italy and that is one of the main reasons why the market has grown,” said Alberto Cirillo, co-head of Goldman Sachs’ private wealth management for continental Europe.
Private equity firms have hoovered up Italian assets, largely small and medium-sized family-owned businesses referred to by bankers as “hidden gems” because they tend to have low leverage and good cash reserves.
These so-called liquidity events have helped Italian entrepreneurs cash in on hundreds of millions of euros and transformed them into sought-after clients for private bankers.
There were almost 3,500 deals between 2013 and 2025 totalling about €362bn, according to estimates from Swiss private bank Pictet and Politecnico di Milano Graduate School of Management. They expect another 3,900 transactions worth almost €350bn in Italy over the next decade.
Italy’s private banks hit a record €1.4tn in assets at the end of 2025, double the amount they had 10 years ago, according to data from industry group Associazione Italiana Private Banking.
“Italy has the sweet spot of transactions in the mid-market and upper mid-market because of family-owned businesses,” said Rob Mullane, co-head of private wealth management for Emea at Goldman Sachs. “Italy has been one of the shining lights of growth for us.”
The ultra-high-net-worth segment in Italy is largely dominated by international lenders such as US banks Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase as well as Switzerland’s UBS. Morgan Stanley is notably absent after it sold its private wealth unit covering the UK, Italy and the Middle East to Credit Suisse in 2013, which passed to UBS in 2023.
To compete in an increasingly crowded market, Italian lenders and European banks with a smaller presence have turned to tied-agent contracts that larger firms have sworn off using.
“The war for talent is definitely out there,” said Sarah Catania, head of JPMorgan’s private banking business for continental Europe.
She added: “We always try to make sure that our people’s ambition is to build a career at the firm to mirror the long-term relationships we build with our clients and their families: you need stability to do that, so we try to disincentivise them from just short-term gain.”
Competition for bankers has accelerated over the past 18 months thanks to a wave of dealmaking in Italian banking, in particular Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s takeover of Milan-based Mediobanca.
Rival banks have been quick to pick off Mediobanca’s private bankers, which is the pre-eminent Italian brand in wealth management. Several executives told the FT they were competing for Mediobanca bankers who specialise in the ultra-high-net-worth market.
Dozens have already been poached as tied agents by European rivals such as BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank as well as Italian lenders including Intesa Sanpaolo, according to people familiar with the situation.
Intesa in June jointly launched a €30.6bn takeover bid for Monte dei Paschi di Siena together with the country’s fifth-largest lender BPER. If Intesa’s approach for MPS succeeds, it would acquire Mediobanca’s coveted private banking business — though in a twist of Italian dealmaking, MPS has since launched its own takeover bids for two other rivals.
Executives have warned that some of the agreements to lure bankers make little economic sense.
One senior executive at a major Italian lender described the competition as “savage” over the past year. “The market is looking for asset growth but what these banks end up with is non-profitable growth,” they added.
While tied agents made up just over 60 per cent of the Italian private banking sector as of March, according to estimates from Lombard Odier, the vast majority still serve the mass affluent market.
The arrangement makes more sense in that segment of the market because the return on assets — the revenue a bank earns as a percentage of client assets — is higher for mass affluent clients who typically pay high recurring fees.
Returns quickly start to fall with high-net-worth clients who wield the power to bargain down fees but want tailored investments rather than packaged products, making them more expensive for banks to serve.
“[Tied agents] work for small clients where the return on assets of the account is between 2 and 4 per cent but when you move up to the ultra-high, that goes down dramatically so the model in theory doesn’t work,” said Sforza.
She added: “I’m convinced that this is a game that will end because these banks will never make money out of these bankers. They pay them too much.”