Private banking is, at bottom, a distribution business. Someone else manufactures the product. You assess it, position it, and place it with clients whose circumstances you understand better than the manufacturer does.
I did that for close to twenty years, across Citibank, Julius Baer, JM Financial and Neo Wealth, mostly with Indian family offices and principals. It is a good education. You see a very large number of propositions and you develop a fast instinct for which ones will survive diligence.
The recurring gap
What I kept noticing was an absence rather than a flaw. Clients wanted long-duration, real, income-producing exposure in the markets they came from. What the shelf offered was either liquid public instruments with no connection to those markets, or private deals with ticket sizes and lock-ups that only worked for a handful of families.
Meanwhile the assets those clients would actually have wanted — the school their nephew attends, the ground their town lacks, the clinic in the district — had no way of being owned at all.
Why build rather than keep advising
Because the gap was structural, and you cannot advise your way out of a structural gap. Somebody has to originate the asset, put it in a vehicle that works, and take the regulatory path that makes it ownable. None of that happens from the distribution side of the table.
So since 2024 the work has been on the other side: a school infrastructure company in India, a cricket league across three African markets, and a platform being built to open both up to people who could never write an institutional cheque.
What carries over
More than I expected. Twenty years of watching allocators decline things is an unusually good preparation for building something they might not. You know in advance which questions arrive, and you can design for them rather than improvise answers.
The instinct that transfers least well is the distributor's comfort with a good story. On this side of the table, the story is the least load-bearing part of the structure.