Last week in Zurich, Gerard Aquilina, the head of international private banking at Barclays (BCS) Wealth International Private Bank (or the Vice Chairman at Barclays Wealth, for short), told the members of his audience that they should beware “the complexities of dealing with ultra high net worths.” According to Matthew Lynn, Mr. Aquilina explained that “demanding and often unreasonable” requests, like getting one’s child into the correct school, could very well create “impossible demands on the organization.”
“Mr. Aquilina,” Mr. Lynn says, “has put a spotlight on an industry that only has itself to blame.”
It’s curious that Mr. Aquilina’s warnings were given in Zurich, which is not the place where you expect to hear what most bankers would call, gutturally, gobbledygook. But Mr. Aquilina does not seem like a rabble-rouser, or a pauper. In one available photograph, he sports slicked-back hair, a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, and a nice-looking lady on each arm, which, taken together, give him the exact air of The Most Interesting Man in the World.
On his Facebook page, his profile picture shows him playing a nylon-stringed classical guitar in trunks and a clean white T-shirt, next to a smiling young woman.
He is also well-traveled, according to one short biography. Before Barclays, he was CEO of HSBC Private Bank in the Americas, and before that he was Merrill Lynch’s global head of sales and marketing for the International Private Client Group, the country head for Brazil Private Clients, and Head of Marketing for Latin America, Western Europe and the Middle East for Merrill Lynch International Bank London. And not only does he hold a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Columbia University and a JD in International Law from American University, but he has something called “an LLM in Maritime Law” from the University of London.
