David Evans: understanding people, building purpose

Originally from Kent, David Evans has spent 25 years in wealth management in London. He speaks with genuine admiration for his clients: their desire to do things differently, their relentless optimism, their confidence in their own success and, often, their focus on purpose and giving back.

Working within Pictet's UK office, David works predominantly with entrepreneurs and business-owning families. Over the years, he has actively built his own clientele, and sees himself first and foremost as a partner to his clients. His role has centred on understanding people and providing proactive guidance. David places considerable importance on linking personal passions to client relationships, and his network reflects this. The result is a client community that extends well beyond formal introductions. 

The clients David works with are, by definition, complex. Multiple generations, multiple jurisdictions, multiple structures and often multiple banking relationships. That complexity, he argues, keeps his thinking sharp. “It’s ever-changing,” he says. 
It gives me an expanse of knowledge that otherwise you would not have.”With clients, curiosity is his most important attribute. “I have to want to know why things are important to a client, what is driving it and how that informs their objectives.” He asks “why” more often than most would consider necessary. This lets him anticipate needs and avoid unwelcome surprises. He knows what will concern a client before they do, and which conversations to open and which to leave. It’s a form of attentiveness that no product or platform can replicate.

What draws David to the entrepreneurial world is that collaboration feels organic rather than mechanical. Entrepreneurs acknowledge they do not have all the answers and that someone else may know more. Part of his job, therefore, is to facilitate introductions among clients and create meaningful connections. On any given day, he might connect a venture capitalist interested in education technology with a leading practitioner in that field, or bring together two families who have never met but are navigating identical governance questions.

This approach extends to his engagement with organisations which bring together entrepreneurs, families and next-generation wealth holders around shared purposes. “You can plug into one of these things and then cross-fertilise the ideas,” he says. The approach is, in his words, entirely costless and riskless. “My network expands, the potential for collaboration expands.”

Over the past several years, David has developed particular expertise at the intersection of wealth management and philanthropy. Not as a discrete service, but as a natural extension of the curiosity he brings to every client relationship.

What drew him to Pictet is the philanthropy offering as a boutique consultancy: the flexibility to start wherever the client wants to start, whether at the very beginning of their philanthropic journey or at a point where an existing strategy needs reshaping. The approach is unbiased and allows unlimited time on the subject.

Compared with competitors in the UK, David believes Pictet’s differentiator lies in its willingness to engage with clients beyond hard commerciality, taking a longer-term, less institutional and more individual-focused approach. Pictet also practises what it promotes, through its own sustainability initiatives, investment practices and foundation. “We can talk about what we are actually doing and why,” he says.

Within Pictet, David works closely with colleagues who specialise in philanthropic structuring and family advisory such as Christoph Courth, Head of Philanthropy Services, and Honora Ducatillon, Head of Family Advisory. He values the institution’s scale combined with what he describes as its cohesion. 

When a client raises philanthropic ambitions, David treats it not as a sidebar to the financial conversation but as its most revealing thread. “That could be your one opportunity to tune very directly into their ultimate passion and ultimate objective.”

The trend David finds most compelling among entrepreneurs is what he calls self-sustaining philanthropy: investing in technology that advances a cause while generating commercial returns that fund further impact. "Entrepreneurship, impact and philanthropy together, that is number one."

One entrepreneur he finds particularly inspiring raised approximately 40 million dollars for research into spinal injury treatment by combining rigorous scientific knowledge, entrepreneurial conviction and targeted engagement with major foundations. David cites this as a standout example of what becomes possible when the boundaries between giving and building dissolve.

He also observes growing collaboration among philanthropists organising themselves to scale their efforts, increasing interest in technology-driven solutions to complex problems such as energy and climate, and a blurring of the impact–philanthropy spectrum where commercial ventures can achieve philanthropic-scale outcomes.

The families David works with are rarely static. The next generation, typically aged between 25 and 35 in his experience, arrives at the conversation with its own views on purpose, risk and the direction of family wealth. Some want to run the business. Others are drawn to venture investment using family capital, often with an impact orientation. Many are asking a more fundamental question: what is this wealth actually for?

David has observed philanthropy serve as a point of family cohesion, a topic around which different generations can sit together and work towards a shared purpose. In roundtable sessions he has hosted, the conversations that emerged were, in his words, “quite cathartic for some people.” Family members aired disagreements around giving strategy, intergenerational misalignments and the challenge of balancing liquidity with long-term philanthropic objectives. The fact that those conversations are now happening at all, he says, represents meaningful progress.

David closes by pointing to a research collaboration between Pictet and Oxford University on the evolving role of women in philanthropy. He regards the project as genuinely significant: evidence-based, free from assumption and capable of advancing a conversation that remains, in many quarters, unfinished. “We’re asking the questions which nobody else has”.