In the last years, Private Banking has gone through a revolution due to changes both in the market scenario¹ and in the competitive one², as well as in the clients' attitude: they have become not only wary of financial institutions, particularly after the credit crunch, but also much more demanding because more informed than before and stressed by problems about the inter-generational transfer of personal patrimony.

On the demand side, these changes have induced the need to have a unique reference point for the resolution of patrimonial issues as a whole: from the financial management to the long-term patrimonial planning, from the family patrimony management to the family business one. Instead, on the offer side, they have pushed Private operators to develop new business models in order to support the enlargement of the service range³ and the shifting to value-adding services that were family business-centered, such as the consulting on family business management topics.
In other words, the operators' value proposition could not be traditional anymore but evolved after that the above mentioned changes had happened; and going for an evolved value proposition means to meet not only the need of patrimony protection and growth, but also the need of an integrated management of assets and liabilities within the “Business-Family-Patrimony” system. In Italy, the stake is really high, provided that the family businesses are 80% of the Italian firms and the family business entrepreneurs are 60% of the Private segment.

The role that the evolved operators can play in the development of a family business is even more crucial if you consider the difficulties that family businesses are facing firstly due to the joint effects of globalization and credit crunch, which imply new strategies for growth, innovation, differentiation and de-localization; secondly due to governance requirements to be met by law (e.g., current enforcement on MiFID and Basel II regulatory framework) or to be followed in order to carry out successfully a succession.

In particular, the succession and the consequent generational development are the main challenge that a family business could ever accept and an evolved operator from the Private Banking field would be a primary supporter if it acts as the unique pivot both in the succession management since the succession plan definition and in the addressing of generational development by levering on customized management consulting services.
In Italy, interesting examples of evolved operators are those dynamic and innovative consulting firms and those competence centers linked both to academic and consulting environment that developed their service model to be oriented to problem solving in a family business (with great regards to succession issues), because those firms and centers are network of specialists whose experience is international but well targeted to the peculiarities of the Italian Private segment, so that they can be both the natural advisors of a family business in the round and the facilitator of the relationship between the family business and the financial institutions.


Short Biography of the Author

Alfredo De Massis is a Manager at SCS Consulting, where he works with primary clients from Finance field. Furthermore, he is responsible for consulting, research and training activities on entrepreneurship and family business topics and has led several projects both on succession strategy definition and on succession management.
He graduated cum laude in Management Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, where he improved his education by taking a Ph.D in succession management for family businesses, after having been a financial analyst at Borsa Italiana S.p.A.. In the meanwhile, he was also researcher at Politecnico di Milano, at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca and at the Centre for Entrepreneurship & Family Business of the Haskayne School of Business (Canada). After the Ph.D, he matured a several years' experience in strategy and organizational consulting to Italian and European financial institutions as management consultant at Accenture Italy (Strategy Service Line).
He is member of the Italian Family Enterprise Research Academy (ITFERA) and the author of two books and more than thirty publications on scientific newspapers and international congress acts.