It is worth stopping occasionally to reflect on how much and how fast life in certain professions has changed.
Consider the athletes representing their nations at this year’s European football championship. As the delayed contest draws to a close in London, study their physiques and lifestyles. They run like racehorses, rarely drink and would run rings around their contemporaries from 20 years ago.
Banking is a different place, too. Retail banking, transformed by financial technology, is unrecognisable from a decade ago. The Covid era has redrawn investment banking. No investor roadshows for issuers and investment bankers helps in part to explain the rapid rise of special-purpose acquisition companies (Spacs).
In private banking, the pace of change has been slower, but real, nonetheless. The wealth-tech revolution is coming.
Take BNP Paribas’s Wealth Management University (WMU).
In 2014, Vincent Lecomte, CEO of BNP Paribas Wealth Management, launched a private banking certification programme.
The process at first was simple enough. Wherever it actively served wealthy clients, the French bank’s relationship managers (RMs) had to be made aware not just of internal rule changes but shifts in national and international regulation.
To be a private banker at BNP Paribas, you had to pass an annual test.
