Monday, May 13, 2019

A Private Bank by Any Other Name . . .

Family office services…plus loans to wealthy clients who need quick cash to meet a capital call or buy a villa…plus investment selection and supervision.

The functions of a private bank? Yes. but in this case the tasks are performed by the team Lyon Polk has assembled at Morgan Stanley. They manage over $15 billion.

Banks, trust companies, wirehouses and advisory firms all seek to offer comprehensive services to the wealthy. And it's getting hard to tell them apart.

3 comments:

Jim Gust said...

Have you noticed the Morgan Stanley ads in the Wall Street Journal? Full color, full page, and I was wondering if you had free-lanced the copy for them. Seemed to be very much your tone and style.

JLM said...

I seldom see the WSJ in print, so I checked out the Print Edition option on their first-class web site. It's a good pixelated version of flipping through the paper, and I easily found Morgan Stanley's Wednesday ad.

No, I didn't write it, but it bolsters my point. Everybody's trying to get the same business and everybody saw the research about financially inept kids being the number one worry of the wealthy. Put the two guys in this ad in suits, add a couple of three-syllable words and you have a Northern Trust ad. Dress them down half a notch and you've got an ad for Schwab or Edelman.

Gosh, whatever happened to Ted Bates' Unique Selling Proposition?

JLM said...

I meant six syllable.