Led by former Banco Santander chief executive Javier Marín and with private equity backing from Warburg Pincus, Singular Bank’s transformation has come faster than most. A steady stream of acquisitions over the last two years has propelled the Madrid-based firm to new heights and made it a force to be reckoned with in the Spanish market.
In 2020, the firm announced it would purchase Belgravia Capital - a European equities specialist - turning it into Singular AM. That same year, Singular Bank also bought Quintet Private Bank’s Spanish operations. Then in 2021, in a desire for greater local scale, Singular Bank announced it would buy the Spanish private banking unit of UBS.
Approval for the purchase of UBS Gestion arrived in 2022, giving Singular Bank a team of almost 400 professionals, 15 offices nationwide and assets under management of €20 billion. That is a dramatic increase from just a few years prior, more than doubling the firm’s office footprint.
All this has brought rising name recognition and prestige. Yet seamless integration of these new acquisitions has meant the firm has not had to sacrifice agility for scale. More than 170 of the firm’s staff are bankers and financial agents, and there is a careful strategy to ensure that the number of clients per banker remains limited. Singular Bank’s transformation is all the more impressive for combining rapid expansion with bespoke customer service.