Neville retired as director general of the Guernsey Financial Services Commission in 2009.
According to Kleinwort, the reorganisation will see the London-based private bank reorganise into three distinct business units, and had been conceived before Kleinwort Benson was sold last year by its then parent, Commerzbank, to RHJ International, a Belgian holding company.
Under the reorganisation, Guernsey has become the company’s banking hub, while Jersey is its centre for Private & Corporate Fiduciary business, as well as Kleinwort’s information technology infrastructure and its securities operations.
Angus Taylor, managing director of the Kleinwort Benson Jersey operation, has been given the added role and title of head of Private & Corporate Fiduciary, while the role of head of Private Wealth Management will go to whomever is eventually named managing director of the firm’s London office.
As reported here last month, also as part of the restructuring, Mark Bright was named managing director of Kleinwort’s Guernsey operation, succeeding Sandra Platts. Bright was also given the title and added duties of head of banking.
“As part of [a] company-wide efficiency measure…it is anticipated that 15 roles across a range of business areas in Jersey will be affected”, a company spokesperson said in response to a query.
“It is important to note that nothing is definite as of yet, as the collective consultation process is still under way.”
A published report that an additional 85 Kleinwort Benson jobs may be under threat across the company’s non-Jersey operations was described as "incorrect" but further clarification was not immediately available.
Not migration-related
The restructuring at Kleinwort Benson is described as being separate from a migration of the company’s entire deposit-taking activity from Jersey to Guernsey, which was announced earlier this year and saw 30 banking jobs go.
That migration occurred because Commerzbank’s sale of Kleinwort to RHJ, which was completed in July, meant that Kleinwort Benson was no longer owned by a “top 500 bank of national or systemic importance” and thus under Jersey law was no longer eligible to conduct banking business on the island.
Commerzbank had been forced under EU law to sell various non-German assets after it was bailed out by the German government following heavy losses in the global financial downturn.
Kleinwort Benson dates back to 1786, when it was founded in Germany by Hinrich Kleinwort as a commercial bank; this entity merged in 1961 with a UK-based firm bearing the Benson name. Its ownership continued to change throughout the 1980s and 1990s, until it passed into the ownership of Commerzbank in January 2009 when its parent at the time, Dresdner AG, was sold, where it remained only a matter of months before passing on to RHJ.
