Santander Hires Private Bankers in Brazil as GDP Growth Mints Millionaires
Banco Santander Brasil SA plans to expand its team of 122 private bankers by as much as 20 percent this year as Brazil’s economic growth fuels demand for wealth- management services.
“The positive economic moment Brazil is experiencing is supporting an aggressive growth of the private-banking business,” Maria Eugenia Lopez, who runs Santander Brasil’s private-banking unit, said in an interview on March 1. “It’s not just because Brazilians are getting richer; it’s also about the dynamics in the market, with more IPOs, more mergers and acquisitions, new businesses in general.”
The fastest economic growth in more than two decades, including record expansions in credit and employment, is adding millionaires to Brazil’s population, pushing demand for private- banking services. Brazil’s gross domestic product grew 7.5 percent last year, the fastest since 1986, according to the nation’s statistics agency IBGE.
The private-banking industry in Brazil ended 2010 with 371.2 billion reais ($224.3 billion) of assets under management, a 23 percent increase from 2009, according to the Brazilian Association of Financial and Capital Market Institutions, known as Anbima. The number of clients rose to more than 63,000 by yearend from about 57,000 in December 2009, Anbima said.
Assets under management at Santander Brasil’s private bank rose 25 percent in the period, Lopez said. The minimum investment is 3 million reais at Santander while some other Brazilian banks include customers with more than 1 million reais in investments as private-banking clients.
Santander’s Expansion
Santander also is expanding its private-banking staff this year to face increasing competition from retail and investment banks that are entering the Brazilian market, Lopez said.
“Private banking is an area that doesn’t require capital, so there are very few barriers to get into this business,” Lopez said, adding that Santander’s target is to continue expanding more than the market average.
Santander Brasil’s private-banking unit is finding more clients internally from the bank’s growing retail-services and investment-banking businesses, giving it access to more share sales and merger-and-acquisition deals, Lopez said.
Since April, Santander established a strategy division with an economist dedicated to analyzing economic scenarios and arranging calls for clients. It also started an asset-allocation division and a succession-planning service.
To contact the reporter on this story: Adriana Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro at abrasileiro@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
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