High net-worth attachments: emotional labour, relational work, and financial subjectivities in private wealth management

ABSTRACT

Private Wealth Management (PWM) is a market providing financial services to High and Ultra High Net-Worth individuals and families. Here, efforts developed by wealth managers to attach those involved with wealth to financial instruments point to how the financial subjectivities of investor and advisor are co-enacted. So far, cultural economic literatures on the subjectivities entailed with financial markets have mostly produced separate accounts focused on financial consumers or professionals. Drawing on interviews with wealth managers in Lisbon, London, Geneva, and Zurich, this article demonstrates how investor and advisor subject positions co-materialize with the (re)reproduction of market attachments. By enriching a cultural economic heuristic of arts of attachment with insights from economic sociology, two main findings are generated. First, stabilizing customers as investors demands transmitting advice as ‘genuine’ care, rather than commercial interest; secondly, cultivating financial attachments within customers’ frames of intimate ties demands re-organizing how monetary and financial forms are imbricated with family (notably kinship) ties. These findings allow stressing how processes of financialization of wealth do not correspond to an intrinsic, natural involvement of U/HNWIs with financial markets and organizations but demand the occupation of financial subject positions that are critically involved with those of their financial services providers.

KEYWORDS:

• Private wealth management
• financial subjects
• market attachment
• emotional labour
• relational work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 U/HNWIs are defined according to their ‘investable wealth’ understood as ‘excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables’ (Capgemini World Wealth Reports), with High Net-Worth owning at least 1million, and those exceeding 50 m labelled as Ultra High Net-worth. Following this, PWM organizations segment their clients off mass retail by applying minimum wealth entry thresholds of typically 1 million (GBP/EUR/CHF), although these can be lower or higher depending on the type of organization and on national contexts.

2 16 managers in Lisbon, 8 managers in London, 3 managers in Geneva and 2 managers in Zurich. In some cases, follow-up interviews were also conducted. Interviews were for the most part recorded and transcribed, whereas when permission to record was declined I took written notes. To ensure confidentiality, transcripts have been anonymized and/or used under fictitious names. Where interviews were not conducted in English, translations from the Portuguese are my responsibility.

3 In Portugal, 6 interviews at private banking arms of Portuguese and international retail banks, 3 at a Portuguese private bank, 3 at the offices of two swiss private banks, 1 with one manager from an Andorran private bank without offices in Portugal and 3 at independent investment managers and family-office boutiques. In London, 3 interviews took place over the same day, at the premises of one of the oldest private banks still running as family business in England, 2 at independent investment management firms, 1 (plus another follow-up interview) at one British private bank, 1 at the wealth management arm of a large British retail bank, and 1 (plus a follow-up) at the London- premises of an international Swiss private bank. Finally, in Geneva interviews took place at the premises of one big Swiss private bank but also, contrastingly, at the sombre, wood-panelled meeting rooms of two more traditional private banks; in Zurich, I met with two managers at a cocktail bar nearby the premises of the Swiss private bank where they both worked.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number 1332106].

Notes on contributors

Mariana Santos

Mariana Santos is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium). Her research interests sit within Cultural Economic approaches to Finance and the geographies of money and finance. Her previous doctoral research conducted at Durham University, UK, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Langley has looked at how the Private wealth management sector in different countries help shaping imaginaries and experiences of money and capital of High Net-Worth clients. At Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, her work has focused on the changing financial geographies in Europe, notably concerning digitization and sustainability transformation strategies, and how these are entailed with distinctive financial subjectivities and changes in the urban environment.