The proportion of female ultra-high-net-worth-individuals (that is to say, multimillionaires and billionaires) globally rose by nearly half between 2010 and 2013 (although they still represent a tiny minority), according to Julius Baer. Naturally, private banks and wealth advisors are increasingly gearing their services towards women.
But implementing a female-friendly strategy is not cut-and-dried. “It’s too simplistic to have a one-size-fits-all approach. You’ve just got to figure out what works to engage that particular client,” Sarah Courtney-Dockett, managing director and head of women in wealth, Europe, Middle East and Africa at Citi Private Bank, based in London, said in an interview. “What’s very important to a female entrepreneur in Turkey might be different to an inheritor in the UK, but there’ll be some commonalities.”
“I do think women tend to ask more questions, which leads some people to think they want to take less risk,” said Courtney-Dockett. “It’s actually just they truly want to be educated and they want to understand. If they don’t understand, they feel uncomfortable. So if you spend the time educating them and creating a kind of safe, warm environment where they can ask questions, you’ll have a much better kind of investment outcome because they very much will take risk. They just want to have been educated to do that.”
“Women are definitely very goal-oriented and what I mean by that is they take a step back and they think ‘what do I need for liquidity for, say, two or three years? What do I need to live on for the rest of my years? What do I want to do in philanthropy and arts or impact and giving and then what to do with the rest?’ They’re also very focused on making sure that their children have a positive relationship with money. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can help them do that.”
Diverse clients, diverse teams
In Citi Private Bank’s Europe, Middle East and Africa business, “broadly speaking, there is an equal mix” of clients who were entrepreneurs and who inherited wealth. The concept of inherited wealth does not “necessarily mean from parent down to child. There are circumstances where divorce, for example, [means] all of a sudden this woman has a large sum of money. They’ve never been running the finances.” Perhaps they had “been very busy running their own businesses,” or working as a professional. But “their husband, typically because of the culture of society,” had looked after the couple’s financial affairs. “So it is like learning a new language for them, but it’s no different to a male or female entrepreneur suddenly selling their business and having to invest a hundred million.”
The third key constituency are financial professionals, who Courtney-Dockett said, “may be very sophisticated, but they’re so time short.”
Reshaping approach
“Women currently control 30% of the world’s wealth and that’s going to 55% by 2030.” Starting in 2021, “we took a step back and we thought, ‘well, what does that mean for us and what will that mean for women as investors as they’re going to become incredibly important as decision-makers’ and there was a couple of things. We did a lot of external research and we did come across some different misinformation about pink labelling and that women don’t want to take risk and quite frankly that’s not true.”
“What took me by surprise was that in some of the countries that I thought might be more inherited [wealth], actually, there was entrepreneurs,” Courtney-Dockett said. “And that quickly led me to think, you know, this isn’t about two or three people from London trying to work out a strategy. This is super important.” Instead, the team has “engaged people on the ground” with an advisory board representing each market that formally launched in 2023. “Our strategy has always been about collaboration and understanding local cultural norms.” Since then, the concept has been reproduced internationally and now “we share best practices” across regions.
What has changed? “Things like our website, for example,” Courtney-Dockett said. “I do remember in January 2021 actually clicking through our Europe, Middle East and Africa website and it took me 20 clicks to get to a white woman.” Now the site profiles successful women clients and their decision-making processes, and Citi hosts female-oriented networking and community-building events in major cities (though not yet in Luxembourg).
“I would say women definitely like community and talking about these things together,” she commented. “I’m not saying men don’t, but I’m just saying women really value that and we try and make sure we have those communities in place to do that.” Language is key, too. Essentially, “it’s all about the listening and really listening to what they want.” When the bank is pitching a potential client, “probably the same material is used for a man or a female, but it’s how you present it and how you talk about it.”
Financial wellness
“You know all investors’ behaviour is shaped by our cultural experiences,” Courtney-Dockett said. “Your experience and relationship with money has largely been taught to you by the age of 14 by your parents. So that is a key point, which is why we spend a lot of time and a lot of focus speaking with [and working] with clients to make sure their children’s relationship with money is kind of a ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’ one.”
“Financial wellness” is another focus, “because there’s a real misnomer that because you’re uber wealthy, people think you are financially well and actually that’s not true.” Incredibly savvy professionals can be “overleveraged” or have portfolios that are “under diversified or too concentrated.” Sometimes clients are simply underprepared. “You could be caught out if someone dies and the planning isn’t in place.”
She cited several clients who, following the death of a spouse, did not have a clear overview of their financial and investment situation and sometimes struggled to understand the products in their portfolio. Even worse, spouses sometimes are not listed on bank accounts and the surviving spouse will not be able to access funds or learn about holdings for some time. Some couples have not had effective wills in place, which can block the entire process further during legal proceedings. “That would not be a conversation I would want any of our bankers or investment advisors to be having because we’ve not thought through” the clients’ situation at a holistic level.
“Fundamentally, we’ve got to think about relationships rather than transactions and I think that has been the shift in banking.” Sometimes that involves diversifying a portfolio with a selection of simpler products or distilling client reporting so that both spouses have a firm handle on their financial affairs.
Women not more risk-averse
The stereotype is that women are more risk-averse investors. But Citi executives categorically claimed that perception is incorrect. There was some “early research” which has resonated through the industry, Courtney-Dockett explained. More fundamentally, “if you’re in financial services, it is all about, at the end of the day, converting to revenue and sales.” If clients are peppering advisors with a barrage of questions, “people go for the easy answer, with an easier product.”
“I have a lot of female clients or the heads of family offices who want to take risk, who want to be, very much, innovative with the investment products that they utilise in their portfolio,” said Luxembourg-based Olga Bogdanova, managing director and team head for North & Central Europe at Citi Private Bank. “They want to be innovative and use new forms of financial instruments, new types of funds and direct investing. They are not risk-averse fundamentally. But they will ask a lot of questions, which might initially create a feeling like they’re not comfortable, but what they’re not comfortable with is not understanding the nuances and how that capital allocation decision will potentially impact their entire allocation.”
Serving female clients
Women clients do not necessarily prefer to have a female advisor. “They just want the best team,” said Courtney-Dockett. “They want to know that there is diversity within the business, but they want the best advisor. And actually, when we’ve interviewed our female clients, what’s interesting to see, it’s not just male advisors but it can also be female advisors that can misunderstand the [client’s] questions and think they’re more risk averse.” About “50% of my clients are female-led,” but “most of them are very happy having a mixed team.” At the same time, “when Jane Fraser got appointed as the first [female] CEO” of Citigroup, in 2021, “I definitely had quite a few emails saying, ‘we know we picked the right bank’.”
“In general, we do all want to be represented by a diverse team, in one way or another,” Bogdanova said. “I want to have a diverse team backing me at work because they bring different ideas, different perspectives. Even male clients. When we’ve come to the deal table with male entrepreneurs, one of the comments that the Citi team has elicited was, ‘Wow, you guys are diverse. You guys are really bringing different languages, different perspectives, different backgrounds, both professional and cultural.’ I think that resonates across the board. But I guess statistically we do have some evidence that females, who’ve historically felt a bit underrepresented, want to see that commitment to diversity by the firm that services them. It doesn’t mean that you need to have someone looking like them. It means that you need to show a general commitment to some diversity in your organisation. It’s probably more intellectually deeper than just like-for-like, if it’s well thought out and thinking about the perspectives and differences of opinion that someone brings to the table.”
“Citi Private Bank only works with ultra-high-net-worth-individuals and therefore these are very complex relationships,” Bogdanova explained. Their clients “have substantial wealth. This is not a million plus or 500,000 plus. Our relationships are €50m plus, typically, with the growing wealth of entrepreneurs. So it’s a complex coverage and therefore we do tend to have deal teams or coverage teams as opposed to a single advisor facing each client and that’s where the team is important,” she stated. “We do not have teams that specialise in female clients. We cover clients by country.”
“This is about bringing everyone to the table,” Courtney-Dockett noted. “We train all bankers, all investment advisors” how to best work with female and male clients.
I can’t tell you I’ve ever had a question from a man reading the same document
Generation gap
Age can be a major difference, but not always. “What I’ve definitely noticed with the younger cohorts is because of society nowadays, they want to be active,” Courtney-Dockett said. “They want to know everything. They want to be making their own decisions. They will vote with their feet, and they have opinions. And then they really want to be involved. Whereas probably if you have been a partner for 20-30 years, and haven’t actively been involved in finances, then it’s quite difficult to change a habit of a lifetime.”
“But then there’s been older clients which have really grabbed the bull by the horn,” Courtney-Dockett stated. “They may have got the money either through a divorce or a death and been unprepared, but they’re like, ‘This is what I want to do. This is the strategy I want to do, and this is who I want to work with.’” Referring to a client who had recently divorced “when I first met her, money was a burden. And we just talked about safety. She now runs three banks and is very well-versed in everything. You know, she’s brilliant. She wanted to diversify and she’s an incredible story of what someone can accomplish in three or four years.”
Why are you doing this? What is your commercial interest in this?
Questions, questions
“The main point that I think about when I face a female client,” Bogdanova said, is “making sure that I have a lot of time for a lot of questions. And they are typically very insightful questions.”
Do women often ask different types of questions? “You would be surprised,” said Courtney-Dockett. For example, she recently spoke with a client “that wanted to leverage against their portfolio, so a Lombard loan. They read the collateral details in detail and asked specific questions on that, which I think is absolutely the right thing to do. And I can’t tell you I’ve ever had a question from a man reading the same document. Sometimes they sign it there and then, [even if I ask] ‘don’t you want to take it back and read it?’ So actually that attention to detail I thought was a real strength of character, to ask those questions.”
Bogdanova observed that female clients and colleagues “who are at the top of their profession... we tend to want to roleplay or scenario [plan and] analyse different outcomes for different business decisions, which is pretty similar to when someone takes an investment decision, right? Where am I going to allocate capital? What are the risks? What is the desired outcome? And then what is the worst-case scenario? And I completely agree that women tend to go much further into the details. I don’t know where that comes from. That’s probably a very deep question, but it is something I definitely see both in my client base and in my talent pool across the business.”
“The other question we get asked more by women--and certain types of male clients, those that have kind of entrepreneurial roots--is ‘how are you making money?’” Bogdanova added. “I get asked that a lot, but in very detailed terms, like ‘why are you doing this? What is your commercial interest in this?’ And then going into the details. That’s a cost and charges kind of question. They want to see that values are aligned, right? They’re happy to pay a fair price, but they don’t want to feel they’re paying a disproportionate price.”
This article was written for the to the of Paperjam magazine, published on 26 March. The content is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the site to contribute to the full Paperjam archive. .
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