Why families should build a forty-year relationship with their bank
When markets are calm, bankers compete on commissions, products, and rates. When they drop 10% in three days, the only thing that matters is who has been in the relationship for twenty years.
Families often ask how they should handle their banking relationships — how many banks to use, how to choose them, when to rotate, when to renegotiate. For us, a family's relationship with its bank is one of the few in finance that should be managed on a forty-year horizon, not a quarterly one.
When markets are calm, families are besieged by commercial offers from newcomers — attractive rates, reduced commissions, sophisticated products. The temptation to rotate is real. We advise resisting it.
Because when markets drop 10% in three days — as they did in 2008, in 2020, and again more recently with the war in Iran — families need their banker to fight for them inside the credit committee, to support lombard lines backed by listed securities, and to recognise that the relationship is not transactional. The bankers who will do that are not the ones who showed up last quarter with a better headline rate. They are the ones who have been in the relationship across cycles.
That loyalty is a two-way street. Westwick advises families to direct their fee-intensive transactions toward the long-standing relationships they intend to keep, not to flit between banks chasing the day's best offer. A banker who has held the line for a family across twenty years of markets will, forty years from now, be the one chairing the investment committee for the next generation.
One important caveat: the loyalty is to the institution, not to the individual. When a banker leaves for a competitor, families should not follow. The temptation is understandable — twenty years of trust does not transfer easily — but the logic is wrong. It is not the banker who makes the bank. It is the bank that makes the banker. A talented banker performs because the house behind them gives them the framework to do so. Move them to a different house, and the framework, by definition, is no longer there. Stay with the house. Get to know their successor. Rebuild the relationship with the same institution.
The practical translation is simple. Choose your banks deliberately, with the long horizon in mind. Concentrate enough business with each to be a relationship that genuinely matters to them. Reward loyalty with loyalty. And accept that you will, occasionally, leave a few basis points on the table — basis points that are, in the cycles that count, the cheapest insurance a family can buy.
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