Compensation Systems and Advisory Quality in Private Banking

Clearly, a new era of Private Banking has arrived. Since many fundamental characteristics of the Private Banking landscape have changed dramatically, Switzerland needs to react quickly in order to defend its high reputation among the international providers. The fact that the clientele is unsatisfied with the core service, namely advisory, is in itself a disaster, and the trend of advisory quality becoming a key differentiator in Private Banking makes it even worse. The goal of this book is, however, not only to show the eminent importance of advisory quality, but to focus on how it can be improved. The sheer number of suggested approaches to solve this problem is only an indication of the urgency to improve advisory quality. More efficient teamwork between CRMs and task-specific experts, implementation of further supportive IT applications, or adapting the product and service offering are only three of the many discussed ways to answer the client demand for improved advisory quality. The approach followed by this book, however, is to adapt the prevailing remuneration system of CRMs in order to provide them the necessary incentives to ameliorate their advisory quality. Therefore, the underlying research question of the book is the following: How does the contemporary compensation system of CRMs need to be adapted in order to improve the provided advisory quality?