Paul Riseborough | Published: 1 April 2025
As Managing Director for Banking at private and commercial bank Arbuthnot Latham, Kevin Barrett is responsible for private and commercial banking as well as marketing, strategy and distribution. Prior to taking up his current role in 2020, Kevin was Regional Director (London Region) at Metro Bank for seven years, serving a combined total of a quarter of a million retail and SME customers. He previously held regional Head of Business Banking and International Commercial Director roles at HSBC among other positions. Kevin began his career with a short stint at Reebok, having graduated from Loughborough University with a BSc in Management, and he also holds a Diploma in Financial Services from the London Institute of Banking & Finance (LIBF).
Paul Riseborough: Kevin, welcome. Having worked together previously at Metro Bank, it would be great to hear about what led you to your current role at Arbuthnot Latham.
Kevin Barrett: You know one of Metro’s big USPs was client advocacy and focus on service, and those values are really key for me. At Arbuthnot Latham, our first business principle is delivering ethical standards, and that has been true for a long time – the company is just over 190 years old, so has been around long before Consumer Duty placed good customer outcomes at the front of how firms should do business!
I oversee both private and commercial banking, which is important because we see so much crossover between these clients. Our clients value having a single point of contact for all aspects of their banking relationship. For a busy entrepreneur, professional or executive, that takes all the complexity out of it.
We prioritise listening before offering solutions, ensuring we truly understand our clients’ needs. We're still small enough that clients feel the human touch and personal service with us, and they value three things in particular. First, our bankers are highly skilled. Second, our support staff provide high-quality service. Third, clients appreciate direct access to our expertise.
When I talk about ethical standards at Arbuthnot Latham, it’s three things. We're there to look after the interests of our clients, our colleagues, and shareholders. It is vital that we stay focused on all three groups. Our clients, especially private banking clients, want to be with a profitable bank as well as one that's going to look after them.
Paul Riseborough: How would you sum up Arbuthnot’s niche in the market? There is perhaps an abiding view of private banking based on days gone by – the aristocracy, inherited wealth – but my sense is that it's now increasingly about entrepreneurs. Individuals that have sold businesses, or that perhaps want to talk about commercial lending. How is the pattern of who uses private banking changing? Or are private banks themselves changing to do more than simply family banking?
Kevin Barrett: To give you an overview, we've got a full-service offering, comprising private banking, commercial banking, wealth management, investment management, asset finance and an asset-based lending businesses. At one end, most of our competitors are the big European and US banks or the UK banks. Then, at the other end, you've got the niche players that are a bit more focused. We sit comfortably in the middle, occupying a unique space in the market.
As you say, these days private clients come in all shapes and sizes – gone are the days when it was just tweeds and country estates. In reality, wealth is far more diverse, both in terms of who holds it and where it’s located across the UK. Over the past five years, we’ve established dedicated teams for the gaming and technology industries in response to significant growth in those sectors. One of our fastest-growing teams focuses on media, specifically TV and film production, as well as advertising agencies.
The key questions we ask when entering a new market are whether that market is big enough, and whether our clients want our tailored value proposition with a strong personal service element. If that demographic is not particularly concerned, then it’s probably not our market. Even in industries like gaming and technology, we’ve found that our approach remains just as important and valued as it is for entrepreneurs, business owners, and private clients. Whether that changes with GenZ, who knows? But at the moment, millennials value the personal touch as much as the generation before them.
Paul Riseborough: How are you organized as a company? Again, there is a sense that is perhaps a little more mysterious compared to the big banks and other organizations. Presumably you have technology teams, operations teams, service teams?
Kevin Barrett: As I mentioned, we group our clients within specific segments, each looked after by bankers who are deeply familiar with and immersed in that sector. We have dedicated teams for entrepreneurs, executives and professionals, commercial, real estate, trading – essentially, areas where we see sufficient market size, can achieve economies of scale by bringing teams together, and encourage knowledge sharing.
In terms of supporting the teams operationally, we don't really differentiate between private or commercial. Our core USP is service, whether you’re a private or commercial client, you receive the same high level of service, the same SLAs, and the same attention to detail. In fact, this was partly our route into the commercial banking market – we were bringing private banking to commercial banking clients. So, by default, the service standards absolutely need to be at the same high level.
Paul Riseborough: It's fascinating to me that your differentiation comes from personal service in a world which is arguably being overwhelmed by digital. How do you get that right? I assume your clients still want good digital services and want to self-serve, so how do you figure out what goes digital and what remains person to person?
Kevin Barrett: We have two key client commitments: being real and approachable, and taking a proactive and practical approach. At its core, this is as simple as our bankers personally responding to emails, answering their phones, or opening accounts for clients. That's our bread and butter from a service perspective, and we can't ever lose that.
That said, when we conducted our client satisfaction survey, clients told us they want more from our digital offering, which has shaped our digital transformation plan. It is a multi-year, multi-million pound programme over the next two to three years to upgrade our mobile banking app, online banking, and some internal processes. When you move towards more self-service, you have to consider what you don’t want to lose. The easy wins are activities where the complexity is low but require unnecessary effort from clients. Digitising these removes friction and enhances efficiency.
We recently launched our entrepreneurs report, and clients told us that throughout the process of buying and selling businesses, the emotional journey is more significant than the financial one. I do think that's something a lot of people overlook. We all behave in slightly different ways, and some clients are relieved to sell their business, while for some it feels like they've lost a child. It's a real spectrum of emotions.
The personal touch is especially important during major life events – starting a family, or at the other extreme going through a divorce, or if they're buying or selling a business. These are the moments when we need to be there to listen to our clients, understand what's going on in their mind, and decide how we can help them.
And that’s not just from a banking and wealth management perspective. It's also about the non-banking aspects. Can we recommend a lawyer who specialises in a specific issue, for example. That's what clients really value, and it’s something that is difficult to digitise.
Paul Riseborough: Is that not inherently hard to scale? The market is rather barbell-shaped in private banking, it seems to me, with big players that do a different type of private banking more akin to mass affluent and the smaller players that offer personalized service, with you in the middle, which is an interesting space to occupy. Is there an upper limit on the number of clients you can take on and still provide that higher level of service? How do you think about those trade-offs, because you could aggressively digitize but very quickly lose your DNA?
Kevin Barrett: Our client base has grown organically by around 60% in the last five years, at a time when the general view is that private banking in the UK has been relatively flat. Key to that has been making sure that our relationship managers and bankers still feel they own a portfolio they can have an impact on. It would be easy to go with a strategy of maximising portfolio sizes and automating or moving their support somewhere else. But, as noted, one of the things our clients truly value is direct access to a dedicated banker and support team. That model is expensive, but we are confident that clients are prepared to pay for it.
Paul Riseborough: Yes, how do you scale in a way where you can control your costs while maintaining the personal service that provides differentiation. As a client, if you can do it yourself, then the value proposition sort of collapses. We've seen that a lot across the market, where people are asking themselves why they're paying private banking fees if what they're getting is very similar to a mass affluent or everyday banking service. Keeping a sense of what your value proposition is seems very important?
Kevin Barrett: Some private banks in the UK have started offering the same proposition across multiple segments – lowering the entry criteria for the mass affluence segment while simultaneously reducing it for private banking. Or they standardise the underlying investment management proposition, making the only difference between mass affluent and private banking clients the delivery – one digital and the other human-first. I can understand why banks are considering this, but it’s not our strategy.
Paul Riseborough: Talk to me about how you compete on the lending and deposits you do, given you're not as big as the big banks who have a lot of pricing power. Presumably you're constantly exploring the value to your clients of the service you provide, and therefore their willingness to accept slightly different pricing? Or is it more about how bespoke that pricing is in terms of really understanding the underlying thing you're lending on, and the non-standard nature of it?
Kevin Barrett: If we deliver a high-quality service that clients truly value, there will be a premium for it. There's always a limit to that premium, but there is a premium nonetheless. On the commercial banking side, being really responsive and pragmatic with client solutions – whether they're borrowing money or looking to place liquidity with us – adds value on the lending side.
We often use the phrase “we do simple lending for complex clients or complex lending for simple clients”. We may not be able to compete with High Street banks due to standardised risk weighting, but clients value our ability to understand their complexity and tailor individual solutions.
It's the same on the deposit side – whether it's a private client or a commercial client, they will pay a premium if you're highly responsive. Say you need to open a trust account – which is a really good example at the moment, as there's very few providers in the UK that will open a trust account. If we can turn that around in a week versus four months, then the client isn’t really that concerned about what rate they're getting on the deposit. Their priority is solving a complexity in their financial affairs quickly, and that’s where we can add value.
Paul Riseborough: How do you see the market evolving for private banks over the next three to five years? Do you think you are going to have to keep digitizing, whether it's your middle and back office or the self-service side? Is it going to be harder to sustain the personal service?
Kevin Barrett: When it comes to digitisation, the utopia for me is giving the banking or wealth management teams more time to spend with their clients to really understand their needs and really look after them.
The challenge private banks have is that they have massively underinvested in their digital banking capabilities. This was partly because they didn't need to, their distribution model meant the client had access to a banker with a portfolio of 75 to 100 clients, which helped mask some of the gaps in their operating model. But now, most banks have reached a point where it’s the clients driving demand – they want to get their tax certificate through an app rather than emailing their banker to get it sent to them.
Paul Riseborough: That must place a premium on finding exceptional bankers, because if that's going to be your key differentiator – whether they can build relationships in a really deep way, build loyalty, pick up on cues, think ahead… How do you identify those people? Because it’s one thing understanding the media sector and the wealth within it, but it's quite another to think creatively about how you're going to serve that client and build rapport.
Kevin Barrett: When we're recruiting bankers and wealth managers, we focus on two key attributes: they've got to be really organised and really likable. If you're organised but lack the necessary warmth, sure you may never let your client down, because you'll always do what you said you're going to do – but there'll be no client advocacy.
Likewise, you might be incredibly warm and very nice, but if you're not organised, you will continually let your client down when they need you. You’ll start from a position of strength and then erode it by not keeping promises, not doing what you say you're going to do.
The ideal banker or wealth manager not only delivers on their promises but exceeds them, all while being incredibly personable. They get to know you, your family, and your business – paying close attention to the small details. Finding individuals like that is really hard. While we sometimes recruit from other banks, we try to grow that talent in-house. We've heavily invested in our early careers programme, because training individuals from the outset ensures they uphold our standards and values.
Paul Riseborough: What are your thoughts on the future of service and the degree to which that is going to be sustainable in this very digitizing world? If you look across financial services broadly, there's arguably been a deterioration in service. It's all about what you as a customer can get out of the technology, not whether someone is personally looking after you.
Kevin Barrett: I do think what people say and what they do are often two different things. A really good example is a trend that you'll have heard a lot about, which is purposeful, ethical investing. We surveyed clients on this, specifically asking if they would consider ESG investments even if it meant lower returns compared to non-ESG investments.
As it turns out, millennials were more negative on that question than some of the other generations. They saw ESG investing as important – but not at the cost of lower returns. Meanwhile, clients aged 45 to 65, who are more focused on tax-efficient wealth transfer, were more willing than millennials to accept reduced returns if it was ESG investing. We all went into the survey thinking it was going to be completely the other way around – and this survey had a 12% response rate from our total client base, so a significant and representative sample.
Looking ahead five to ten years, as digitisation becomes much more important, the differentiator from a client's perspective is going to be around performance – whether that’s in relation to the self-service offering or the level of personalisation that you're getting (or not getting).
Innovations like AI will certainly enhance personalisation. But for now, our model delivers that – we've got bankers that remember details about clients from 10 years ago. Clients value these moments of truth – it's these interactions that leave an impression and are shared with friends and family. Yes, AI will help bankers look even better in the future, but we're not there yet. That's why making sure you don't lose touch with the human element is crucial – for some clients, it will be the difference between wanting to stay or not stay with a wealth manager.
