Family Office
BNP Paribas buys offshore accts from B of A
French manager claims good track record retaining transferred assets. Bank of America has agreed to sell about 2,000 investment accounts, owned by non-U.S. private clients based in the U.S. and managed by its Global Wealth & Investment Management division, to BNP Paribas Investment Services (IS), Paris-based BNP Paribas' U.S. wealth-management affiliate.
"This transaction gives us the opportunity to double our presence in the United States for the servicing of non-resident wealth management clients," says Francois Debiesse, head of BNP Paribas Private Banking.
The total value of the accounts comes to about $2 billion, though BNP Paribas doesn't expect to capture all of that. "There's always attrition in a deal like this," says Seno Bril, chairman of Miami-based BNP Paribas IS. "But we do expect to keep most of the clients."
Why mince words?
Two years ago BNP Paribas IS captured about 85% of the assets from a transfer of about 900 non-U.S. private-client accounts worth roughly $700,000 from Banque Sudameris, a French and Latin American subsidiary of Italy's Banca Intesa.
The deal with BNP Paribas gives Bank of America a chance to thin its wealth-management position in offshore markets and concentrate on U.S. private clients, where its efforts are backed by weighty private- and retail banking infrastructures.
That's not a concern for BNP Paribas, however. "We don't really care if we have a private-banking presence in a [given] country," says Bril. "We just want to grow."
In addition to its base in Miami, from which it oversees its U.S. clients as well as non-U.S. clients - mostly Central and South Americans - with U.S.-based investments, Bril says BNP Paribas IS plans to open an Asia-leaning office in San Francisco "within a the next few months."
Bank of America's Global Wealth & Investment Management had over $738 billion in client assets under administration, including more than $482 billion in assets under management, on 31 December 2005. BNP Paribas Private Bank, the wealth management arm of BNP Paribas, supervises more than $140 billion on behalf of its clients, mostly in France and the rest of western Europe, Asia and Latin America. -FWR
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