RBS private banking section seeking more international clients

Royal Bank of Scotland's private banking arm is looking for more international customers as it wants to become less UK focused, double in size and bring its international unit into its Coutts brand.

Rory Tapner, RBS's wealth chief, has launched a shake up of the division that involves a push to win new clients in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Asia with the international private bank, currently called RBS Coutts, also to become branded simply as Coutts.

The London based private bank, which counts the Queen among its account holders, will spend less time chasing lower margin customers worth under one million pounds.

The mix of customers will also move away from the home British market of Coutts, reducing the proportion of clients from 60% British to about 40%.

But Tapner said it won’t mean shrinking the UK business. ‘It implies we are adding in more investment in high growth markets rather than take lots of market share in mature markets,’ he said in an interview with Reuters.

By 2015 combined assets and liabilities will rise to £160 billion from about £80 billion currently, Tapner added. The expansion will also be driven by emphasising higher margin business lines such as investment, rather than aggressive capital expenditure.

‘This is much more reorganisation and refocusing than lots of investment. That's part of what I've said to (RBS's chief executive) Stephen Hester and others. This is a self help reorganisation rather than a request for lots of investment,’ he said.

Tapner, who joined the bank from UBS, told staff about the new order, which he describes as ‘a slightly tougher environment’ and is addressing overseas colleagues in Switzerland and Asia.

The shake up does not involve additional job cuts but the new regime will be more performance focused, Tapner said. ‘What I'm hoping is (staff will) simply adjust their behaviour onto the more profitable spaces and therefore there's no real need to think about decreasing numbers,’ he explained.

'To the extent that we find some who just don't adjust, then we will be making some of the slightly harsher decisions, but we're not anticipating that at the moment,’ he added.