WHEN Calum Brewster joined Swiss private bank Julius Baer as head of UK regions last year he felt he was going back to his roots. For while there are many differences between servicing the high-net worth clients of an organisation whose head office overlooks the picturesque Lake Zurich and the customers of a high street bank in Inverkeithing, for Mr Brewster there is one key similarity: the personal touch.

“I am of the generation where there wasn’t such a focus on going to university - everyone joined banks in those days,” he recalls. “Although I was accepted to Edinburgh University I also applied to Clydesdale Bank, Bank of Scotland and Royal Bank of Scotland. Clydesdale Bank was the first to offer me a job and I just took it.

“Working in the branch in Inverkeithing I did all the things that bank staff don’t necessarily do today. In those days your bank did everything - your first cheque book, your first loan, your first mortgage.

“We had a personal relationship with the customers - when someone came in to pay in money I would serve them and I knew everything about them. I really enjoyed having that customer contact and being part of the community.”

Though his career since then has taken Mr Brewster from Aberdeen to London via organisations such as Scottish Widows and Barclays Wealth, when the opportunity came up to head Julius Baer’s operations in Scotland and the UK regions he jumped at the chance, not least because the size of the business has allowed him to interact with clients on a personal level once again.

“When I think back to Inverkeithing and dealing with customers on a personal basis it’s been nice coming back to a small organisation,” he says. “It’s very personal internally because we only have about 6,000 people globally so I’ve got to know the UK and European team, but as the only thing we deal with on a daily basis is wealth management it’s a personal service. I’ve seen more clients in the last 12 months than I’ve been able to see in years.”

Being located outside London is crucial in this respect.

“Julius Baer has been in London for 50 years and Dublin for 20 years and has built up a very successful brand,” Mr Brewster says. “You can promote and deliver a brand to a certain extent working from London but if you really want to establish it you have to be local and understand what happens in the local community.”

This is exactly the point Julius Baer’s UK chief executive David Durlacher made earlier this year when announcing the hire of five further wealth managers to bolster Mr Brewster’s nascent Edinburgh team: “Establishing a presence in Scotland provides our clients with unrivalled local knowledge combined with a global perspective and a unique pure-play offering.” Key to that launch was the opportunity it gave to tap into Scotland’s burgeoning entrepreneurial class, with Mr Brewster noting that the services Julius Baer provides are particularly in demand with people looking for ways to manage their newfound wealth.

“Retail banks have generally looked after mass-affluent clients but the ones we are dealing with tend to be a lot more sophisticated,” he says. “They have either inherited their wealth or it has been generated from running an SME or entrepreneurial activity - something Scotland is particularly strong on - where the wealth has been created very quickly.

“Over a three to five-year period someone can have come out of university with a great idea, developed it and taken it to market, and grown their wealth very quickly. Generally speaking, the clients I’m dealing with don’t start off with that amount of money.”

Given their background, many of the clients Mr Brewster deals with rely on him and his team to not only keep them abreast of anything that could affect their investments but to take decisions on their behalf too.

“The thing I get asked most is ‘how do I preserve what I’ve built up?’,” Mr Brewster says. “Clients want to see value but that goes way beyond cost and performance. They want to hear about what’s happening in the FTSE from us before they turn on the TV and hear it on the news at 10. A lot of clients will delegate authority to us to make decisions on their behalf [for example if there is a fall in the stock market].”

Although investors have had to endure volatile markets in the past 12 months, with political manoeuvring across the globe leading to numerous spikes and falls, Mr Brewster says that events such as Brexit do not tend to unduly influence clients’ decision making.

“With clients today there’s a global perspective - people are more mobile than they’ve ever been so they want the perspective of what it would mean if I did this or my children moved to France,” he says. “But the political agenda will be what it will be. None of us can forecast that.

“I used to use a term when advising client about being a professional fact finder. I really need to know what motivates them so I can build a solution that meets their requirements.

“You can in some ways put the political situation to one side because that will continue no matter what. What worries the clients I’m speaking to is value, passing on their wealth to the next generation and educating the next generation about how they deal with that.

“They need to think about where they want to be at some point in the future rather than worrying about what’s happening in the news today.”

Since joining Julius Baer, Mr Brewster, who spends most of his working week on the road, has built up a team to service the UK regions, with 30 people now working out of bases in Edinburgh, Manchester and Leeds, with a further launch planned for Belfast in the new year. It is a far cry from the retail banking environment that Mr Brewster started out in, where rather than expanding, organisations are cutting back on the on-the-ground services they offer.

Part of this is technology driven, which Mr Brewster notes has largely changed the banking industry “for the better”, although he says that for large sections of the population having access to a high street bank is about so much more than simply being able to complete a transaction.

“Retail banking is hugely transactional and with technology the majority of individuals have become very comfortable with transacting on their mobile phone, but we have to be aware that there’s a generation - my mother included - who like to go into a branch,” he says.

“It’s part of their life and it gets them out and about in the community, but that goes beyond a business discussion and becomes more a social discussion for politicians and policymakers.

“Technology has made things simpler but there does come a time, like when you’re purchasing a mortgage, when you need to speak to someone. We all know the high street is going to change but businesses need to understand that they still need to be accessible to clients. They just need to understand what that means to them.”

Though in his current role Mr Brewster uses many of the skills he learnt in his first job in Inverkeithing, the branch in which he learned them is long gone, shut down in a first wave of closures led by Clydesdale Bank’s former owner National Australia Bank in the mid-2000s.

“Technology doesn’t replace what our clients are asking for,” Mr Brewster says. “I always remember when an ATM - the fintech of the day - was put into our branch at Inverkeithing everyone thought it was a great idea but when it was put in all our clients stood outside in the rain to get their money out. Was that that great? Fintech is fantastic: it’s great for jobs, it’s great for clients and it’s great for the future, but you have to remember that clients want a personal service as well. At the end of the day we shouldn’t assume that technology will replace human interaction.”