Peter White

It’s not the sort of service that people automatically call on their bank for

Peter White confesses to having no financial background and very little financial knowledge. Yet for the past four-and-a-half years, he has been managing director of Citigroup Private Bank’s family advisory practice. Thankfully, his role there is completely non-financial in nature.

Rather, White is part-counsellor, part-life-coach to some of the world’s wealthiest families who bank with Citigroup. “What I do is help clients think about the human implications of whatever it is they are trying to accomplish with respect to their wealth,” he says.

White works alone, travelling the world to give talks or listen to families whose issues can range from little more than non-financial questions about their wealth to those on the brink of litigation over family disputes regarding succession and inheritance. “I’ve always been interested in psychology because of the many neuroses of my own,” jokes White. “But I don’t do psychotherapy – I’m not qualified. And I don’t purport to have the right answers. My contribution is to give a little more perspective, and perhaps make people think about things in a different way.”

As the bank deals with people who tend to have financial assets as opposed to operating assets, one of the areas in which White deals most frequently is inheritance. “People are very interested in how the inheritance can be accomplished in a way that will be good for the heirs and won’t sap their incentives to be productive. There’s a lot to be said sometimes for spending the kids’ inheritance.”

Services such as those offered by White are becoming increasingly required as wealthy families grapple with disunity. “In Europe, and more recently in Asia, there have been breakdowns in family traditions which make it harder to create some sort of long-term legacy. Families are thinking more intently about how to hold a family together and instil a sense of family unity, traditions and values.”

Passing on a family business is not always the best solution, particularly when the heirs are disinterested or lack the appropriate skills.

White often spends his time dealing with succession planning questions. “I’ll sit down with each member of the family to find out how they feel about the business, and see what their interests and capabilities are. Then I’ll bring the family together to talk about it. The most important thing is to get the family working together and communicating honestly.”

Philanthropy can also be a means of uniting a family while addressing transfers of wealth.

“I once dealt with a family who were quite demoralised and didn’t communicate, so I developed the idea of holding dinner talks for them where people were brought in to discuss social issues such as poverty, conservation etc. It generated an incredibly rich conversation among the family while helping with their philanthropic wishes.”

White’s desire and ability to help families cope with the psychological, personal, spiritual and philosophical issues surrounding wealth emerged when he was in his mid-30s. An ambitious and successful trial lawyer, White was made partner in a law firm in Washington. “I was getting everything you think would make you happy – prestige, money, success, and yet I wasn’t happy,” he admits.

“With help I began to understand that the only value by which I was living my life was ambition. So when I started to think about other values like honesty, family, and helping those less fortunate than me, then I began to find some meaning and fulfilment in my own life. I call it my mid-life crisis that started 25 years ago and is still continuing.”

By the mid-1980s, White had swapped his life in the law firm to set up his own business advising charities on how to cope in an increasingly competitive environment. Through his work, White met a number of wealthy families that were supporting the charities. “What really interested me were the similarities I could see with my own experiences. Here were people who were everyone’s envy. People think you cannot have problems because money solves everything – but I could see that wealth did not solve problems, and in some cases, it actually made life more difficult.”

An influential person in White’s life at the time was Maxwell Boverman. Boverman was one of the original practitioners in a field of psychology called family systems, a theory which contradicted the basic Freudian concept that in psychology only the individual should be treated. Family systems focused on treating the family as a whole.

“Max taught me about the powerful hold that family can exert and helped me take responsibility for my own life,” says White.

White’s business shifted focus to helping families rather than charities, and in 1992 he began consultancy work for Bankers Trust. It was there that he met Peter Scaturro, who, when he later became head of Citigroup Private Bank, asked White to join.

White’s services to the bank’s clients are considered as supplementary and are free regardless of whether he spends two hours or two years with a family.

“It’s not the sort of service people automatically call on their bank for, so we make a big effort to let clients know it exists,” he says.

“But we don’t try to impose it, and we don’t charge for it. It’s not how we make our living. If people want help, we will help them, and when people accept that they need the help you are willing to give, it’s a very rewarding job indeed.”