Since late last year, there’s been speculation that the UK wealth management firm, created out of the merger of several organisations, was being bought by a large UK bank. NatWest reports its 2025 results on Friday. Its shares softened after the announcement.
(Adds background and information.)
UK-listed NatWest
Group said today that it is buying Evelyn Partners, the
wealth management group, for £2.7 billion in enterprise
value.
The bank bought the business from funds advised by Permira and
Warburg Pincus, it said in a statement this morning.
A purchase of the wealth management group by a major bank had
been
speculated upon for weeks.
“This deal allows Natwest to resume the journey to dominate the
wealth space in the UK but to justify the price on top of a
difficult integration challenge it is essential that NatWest
remains committed in the longer term and retains a certain
entrepreneurial spirit for the acquired client advisors rather
than impose a top down procedural bureaucracy,” Ray Soudah,
founder and chairman of MilleniumAssociates, a firm specialising
in M&A and strategic advice for financial services, told this
publication today.
NatWest said the transaction has created the UK’s “leading
private banking and wealth management business,” which will
transform its savings and investment offering for its 20 million
customers. (NatWest is the parent of Coutts, the private bank.)
“It [the acquisition] accelerates delivery of NatWest Group’s
strategy, further diversifying income by increasing fee
income by circa 20 per cent pre-revenue synergies,” the bank
said. “It also increases NatWest Group’s exposure to a high
growth, capital light segment, with PBWM becoming c 20 per cent
of group customer assets and liabilities.”
Funds advised by Permira originally invested in Bestinvest in
2014 and through a small number of combinations, most notably
Tilney, Towry and Smith & Williamson, created and integrated the
combined group now known as Evelyn Partners. With Permira a
majority owner, Evelyn’s assets under management increased from
about £5 billion to £69 billion. Warburg Pincus became a minority
investor in the company upon the acquisition of Smith &
Williamson in 2020.
By combining Evelyn Partners’ £69 billion of AUMA with the £59
billion AuMA of NatWest Group’s existing private banking and
wealth management (PBWM) business, NatWest Group will
oversee more than £127 billion of AUMA and total customer assets
and liabilities (CAL) of £188 billion.
Buyback
NatWest also announced that it is buying back £750 million ($1.02
billion) of shares.
“At its heart, this transaction is about putting high-quality
financial planning and advice into the hands of many more people
– wherever they are on their financial journey,” Emma Crystal,
CEO, private banking and wealth management, NatWest Group, said
in a statement emailed to WealthBriefing.
“We look forward to working with our Evelyn Partners colleagues,
combining our capabilities and expertise to build a leading
proposition for clients and customers across the UK,” she
said.
Investors appeared not to cheer the the move today, at least not
until NatWest’s fourth-quarter and 2025 full-year financial
results are out on Friday this week. Shares were down by
4.91 per cent around 10:30 GMT; they have risen, however, about
68 per cent in the 12 months to last Friday, a pattern shared by
a number of other UK banks. Shares in Barclays, for example, are
up 58 per cent over the same 12-month period; for Lloyds Banking
Group, they’re up 63 per cent, and for HSBC, they have risen far
less sharply, up 9.7 per cent, although the other banks rose from
a lower base and HSBC is predominantly an Asian bank these days.
The NatWest/Evelyn transaction is expected to be completed by
this summer and at this stage the parties involved haven’t yet
decided whether to retain the “Evelyn” brand or not,
WealthBriefing understands.
Consolidation and focus on wealth
Such a move comes amid continued consolidation in parts of the
wealth management sector. Areas such as wealth planning -
the kind of topic that Evelyn Partners made an important business
area – are ones that banks see as revenue channels amidst a
continued need for advice and intergenerational wealth transfer -
particularly in the UK as tax burdens rise. NatWest already has
its Coutts brand – one that is aimed mainly at the high net worth
end of the spectrum. It will be interesting to see how this
business will sit alongside Evelyn Partners’ capabilities.
Getting such approaches to work is not straightforward. In
October last year, Lloyds Banking Group, one of the main rival
lenders to NatWest Group, took full ownership of the Schroders
Personal Wealth joint venture that had been originally composed
in 2019. HSBC has its private banking and wealth management
business in the UK – as well as in fast-growing regions such as
Asia, and Barclays has its wealth management and private banking
arm division.