At your service: private bankers provide one-stop financial shopping under one roof.

• Author: Stevenson, Brooks
• Position: Feature Story

For most bank customers, convenience is being able to access an automated teller machine 24 hours a day or transfer funds from one account to another while seated at a personal computer. But what does convenience mean for the high rollers?

Those customers with wallets the size of filing cabinets and portfolios bigger than your average college chemistry text? What does service mean to them? And what are banks doing to provide the kind of niche banking these clients need?

They're taking the "superstore" approach where customers can find everything under one roof. They don't have to buy a membership, but they do have to make an annual salary equivalent to that of an average NBA rookie -- more than $200,000 a year, in most cases.

In the world of private banking, high net-worth clients can put all their money, and the associated services that grow, protect and manage that money, in the capable hands of one bank's welltrained staff.

One-Stop Shopping

As an "executive" banking client, you may go to one person to see the status of your trust fund, make changes in your investment options and review your portfolio, consult with a financial officer, transfer funds into a Money Market account, mull over the details of a sizeable loan, and plan the next 10 years of your financial future.

In the past, the only place you could get multiple services even remotely comparable to this under one roof was a large brokerage house. But you couldn't necessarily do all your banking and investment planning there, and you certainly couldn't do it through a single point of contact. And rarely did you find that a brokerage house had multiple offices in a state with a population the size of Utah's.

Times are changing the way banks service all their clients, especially those with a lot of zeros attached to their balance.

In a nutshell, private banking has taken the needs of an important, affluent client whose net worth meets a certain dollar amount (for many banks that figure hovers around $2 million), and provided for them that one-stop shopping approach for financial services.

These types of clients are busy. They don't always have time to meet with five different financial officers on five different days to discuss all the nuances of their financial future and security. They want, and need, to be able to do it all with one bank, through one person.

Wells Fargo's Utah private banking group, headed by Scott Ulbrich and Greg Wood, has a team of 20 financial consultants...