Lesson from the past

Managing Partner of private bank LODH Christophe Hentsch is the seventh generation of Hentschs to join the firm. He tells Edward Poultney what makes family businesses that little bit more special and why certain similarities cross cultural boundaries.

With historical political stability and massively increased liquidity, industry has developed.

Trading and an energetic and booming construction sector, have allowed citizens to reap the benefits from these projects - leading to an unprecedented growth in the region's financial industry as that capital is invested. But this is not Dubai, Qatar or Bahrain - this is Geneva at the end of the eighteenth century.

Swiss private family bank Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie (LODH) was founded in Geneva in 1796 and Managing Partner Christophe Hentsch, in Dubai as the office celebrates its first birthday (he missed the 2007 opening following a sailing accident that left him trussed up with a broken leg) is the seventh generation of Hentschs to become a partner.

As such, and coupled with LODH's promise to "help you grow and preserve your assets and hand them down to future generations", Hentsch is something of an authority on family businesses and generational wealth management.

From its first investments outside of the Cantons in the 1850s, with funds going into the boom market of the fledgling US railroad system, to the opening of the first foreign representative office in Montreal in the 1950s, the bank now has 20 offices spread across 14 countries.

But this fails to fully illustrate the size of the operation. To put it into figures; the bank manages just over US$160bn (**) in assets, of which around two thirds are linked to private individuals rather than large companies.

"In terms of being a family business, we are close to our clients from generation to generation," says Hentsch, switching between punctilious English and the more familiar French to make sure that he gets the correct meaning across.

Maybe less in Switzerland but certainly when you go abroad, as we have here, you have to position yourself very specifically. You cannot go far from home and not have a clear target, so in terms of providing quality we limit ourselves to wanting to attract ultra high net worth individuals.

Hentsch explains the reasoning behind the opening of the Dubai office as a reaction to the trends currently sweeping global financial circles: "The benchmark is changing and the requirement now from clients is for us to be here on the ground. We've had private clients from the Middle East for at least 50 years, but we had been serving them out of Geneva.

The next point that he emphasises is that, with such a clear target market it is unnecessary to create a big show of pomp and circumstance: "Being a family business really frees you - you don't have the pressure from shareholders, you're not on the stock exchange, you don't have to give quarterly figures, you just don't have to make things spectacular.

So there's no need for us to build a big office and make a show of hiring 50 people from our competitors, we have our relationships and clients and we go from there, we can think long term.