Brooke Harrington’s Capital Without Borders: An Excerpt - The Atlantic
▻http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/wealth-managers/499064
La sociologie des riches vu à travers les yeux d’un gestionnaire de patrimoine.
elite clients may ask wealth management professionals to undergo a contemporary version of the trials of Hercules. Another English practitioner who is nearing the end of a forty-year career in Hong Kong had a particularly impressive story of an impossible task set him by a client bent on testing his trustworthiness:
I was phoned up from Osaka once, by a client who said, “I’m sitting across from Owagi-san, who speaks no English, but we are bowing to each other. He has just said to me through a translator that he needs a thousand sides of smoked salmon by Tuesday, and I’m relying on you to get them.” I said, “I’m your wealth manager, not your fishmonger.” And the client said, “Well, today you’re a fishmonger.” So I had to ring up a friend who knew the guy from Unilever who runs the smoked salmon plant in Scotland. And the plant manager made it happen. So I found out later that my client was testing me by setting me an impossible task—he told me that he was trying to see if I was really up to the kind of job he wanted me to do.
The story is reminiscent in some ways of the tales of knightly quests, complete with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and abject humiliations (“today you’re a fishmonger”)—with a shipment of smoked salmon in place of the Holy Grail. The question behind the impossible task remains consistent: Are you truly devoted?
Clients may also have a pragmatic reason for posing these tests: They allow the client to discover whether the wealth manager possesses the kind of social networks and influence necessary to provide extraordinary personal service. In this case, being “up to the kind of job” the client wanted depended not just on personal resolve but also on knowing the right people, in this case a friend with connections at Unilever. This is consistent with previous research showing that elite professionals serve their clients in part by acting as commercial “matchmakers,” facilitating opportunities that are not available publicly. For example, a study of 19th-century British lawyers showed how their familiarity with clients’ business dealings allowed them to create whole new industries, such as the country’s railroad system; the professionals established a kind of private market, accessible only to the upper crust of British society. Access to such opportunities hinged entirely on trust between clients and professionals, and the related perception of exclusivity. As the study concluded, “To avail oneself of opportunities, one has to be ‘one of us.’”
Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent
By Brooke Harrington
Harvard University Press, 400pp, £22.95
ISBN 9780674743809
Published 29 September 2016
Brooke Harrington - Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent - ValueWalk
▻http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/09/brooke-harrington-capital-without-borders-wealth-managers-one-percent
Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Harvard University Press, 2016) is an innovative approach to addressing a problem that is even more pressing than income inequality—wealth inequality. Recognizing that the wealthy are “notoriously difficult to study,” Harrington, a sociologist, decided to focus instead on wealth managers. In some ways, however, they are even less accessible. As professionals, they are constrained by privacy considerations. Moreover, as a group they have come under attack for being “agents of money laundering and tax evasion” and are thus suspicious of outsiders. To overcome this barrier to access, Harrington trained for two years to gain certification by STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) as a wealth manager herself. Between 2008 and 2015 she conducted 65 interviews with wealth managers in 18 countries.
