Intesa Sanpaolo Wealth Management has been created as a new Luxembourg private banking hub following the merger of the Italian bank’s troubled Luxembourg unit Fideuram Bank Luxembourg with Compagnie de Banque Privée Quilvest SA, which it took over last year.
Intesa’s Fideuram last October signed to acquire CBP Quilvest for 207 million euro, according to the notary deed filed in Luxembourg. The price tag included a merger premium of 150 million euro, the publicly available document said.
Intesa Sanpaolo Wealth Management now has 200 employees and serves a base of around 3,700 European and non-European high net worth individuals, with assets under management in excess of 10 billion euro.
Before being acquired, CBP Quilvest managed some eight billion euro in debt and equity assets and employed 140 people. It was created in 2011 as a private bank by combining the banking activities of the family-owned Quilvest group with Luxembourg-based private bank Compagnie de Banque Privée.
Italian and foreign HNWIs
In a statement, the Turin-based Italian bank said its new Luxembourg hub will strengthen its position in the international private banking market, serving Italian and foreign high net worth individuals. Next to the bank’s Reyl Intesa Sanpaolo unit in Switzerland, the Luxembourg unit will help develop its international private banking business “in areas with promising growth prospects, such as Luxembourg and Belgium,” the bank said.
The sale of CBP Quilvest had already been flagged at the end of 2021 in Quilvest’s annual report.
The Quilvest group is controlled by the Bemberg family conglomerate which traces its roots back to the 19th century, when a German immigrant from Cologne set up a successful brewery business in Argentina under the brand name Quilmes. This brewer now is part of Belgian-American beer giant AB InBev.
Quilvest is globally active in private equity and venture capital, also through various other entities based in Luxembourg, and runs a multi-family wealth management office. The Bemberg family wealth was estimated at around 18 billion dollars in 2021.
Registration error with funds
Fideuram Bank (Luxembourg) SA has been active since 1999 and was a subsidiary of Intesa Sanpaolo. Its registration was deleted from the Luxembourg Business Register on 16 December. According to its 2021 management report, the firm last Spring already was in a process to “refocus” on international private clients after divesting its depositary business to State Street.
As part of that transition, the Luxembourg unit of Intesa also said it needed to report “a correction to an error related to previous years”. The firm meant that the 2021 annual accounts were to be corrected without resorting to the correction of the annual accounts already published and filed.”
In the management report filed on 28 April last year, Intesa reported net income for 2021 of 160.5 million euro, compared to the 17 million reported for 2020, with a 90 percent return on equity. The firm said a correction, a write-down of 5 million euro, was made relating to fund registration errors relating to three funds: Fonditalia Global, created in 1968; Interfund Equity USA Advantage, launched in 1969; and Interfund International Securities New Economy, launched in 2000. In 2014, the bank discovered that there was “a negative unit balance” in the register of unit-holders of these funds.