Pictet people

You describe a childhood surrounded by strong expressions of identity.

My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a sculptor. My father worked as a commercial pilot – later a training pilot – and my grandfather flew in the RAF. What struck me, especially in hindsight, was how self-assured they all were. They understood their craft completely and committed to it fully.

I never felt that same certainty in myself. I never had an answer to what I wanted to be.

I was adopted at five days old, and that leaves you with a quiet but persistent awareness that you don’t fully belong in the same way. Not dramatically, but enough to shape how you see yourself. By the time I finished my education, I still had no real sense of my direction. It wasn’t simply a question of career – it was a question of identity. I didn’t yet know what I stood for.

At 21, two things happen almost simultaneously – you lose your mother, and you arrive in London.

Yes. When my mother was terminally ill, I remember asking her very directly, “What is it you want me to do?” I was looking for a North Star. I felt completely unanchored. She said, “I don’t care what you do, as long as you’re successful.” That stayed with me as I arrived in London.

At the time, her words felt stark. Over the years, I’ve come to understand it differently. It wasn’t pressure. It was about applying yourself fully to whatever opportunity is in front of you – not wasting it.

You step into the City in 1995, into a role that demanded competence from day one.

I joined Lloyds in money markets. My job was to place funds overnight for the bank’s balance sheet – negotiating rates and moving liquidity between institutions. It was fast, unforgiving and very real.

I hadn’t come through a conventional route into that world, so I learned by listening carefully, observing how people behaved and adapting quickly. It gave me momentum, but it didn’t resolve the deeper uncertainty underneath it – who I was, what I stood for.

You move with colleagues to the Royal Bank of Canada, gaining exposure to custody and asset servicing – but eventually step away from it all.

Yes. RBC was where I first really understood the machinery behind the industry – how assets are held, administered and safeguarded. It’s not the visible side of finance, but it underpins everything. At the same time, I still felt unresolved personally. I’d built experience, but I still had no clarity.

At 25, I stepped outside the professional track entirely for a while to travel across Asia. What began as a short period away became two and a half years of immersion in different cultures and ways of thinking.

I spent time with Buddhist monks in Nepal and Tibet, farmers in Laos and Cambodia, fishermen in Fiji. You move through places where you don’t share language, history or context. What matters instead is presence – how you engage people, how you carry yourself, how you build trust quickly.

That ability stayed with me.

One moment from that time seems to have stayed with you in a very practical way.

A nine-hour bus journey from Kathmandu to Pokhara. At each stop, vendors came up to the window selling homemade buns and water. I bought a few things and paid what I was asked – a very polite Brit. The person next to me watched, then told me I was the worst negotiator he’d ever seen! Before I could respond, he’d gone to the row behind and bought exactly the same items from the same vendor for half the price.

What struck me wasn’t the transaction itself, but the realisation behind it – that value is rarely fixed, and that almost everything can be shaped through conversation. It was probably my first real lesson in leverage. We’ve remained friends since then.

By the end of that period, several forces begin to converge – personally and globally.

I knew my travels couldn’t continue indefinitely. I was low on funds and after 9/11, the world no longer felt quite so open-ended. Globally, the atmosphere had shifted. And then one afternoon in Thailand, a spontaneous conversation with someone in the industry led to an unexpected opportunity with a hedge fund in London.

That felt like the right moment to return.

And so Beach Horizon becomes your next chapter – and a very different kind of education.

I spent six years there working across futures markets – crude oil, lumber, pork bellies – pricing, execution and confirming trades with exchanges like the Chicago Board of Trade, CME and NYMEX. It was a great learning curve - and also great fun. It required decisiveness and precision. Markets move quickly and consequences are immediate.

What helped me just as much, though, was everything I’d accumulated beforehand – the ability to connect quickly, establish rapport without preamble and build trust fast.

Royal Bank of Canada brings you back again – this time into a more commercial role, and eventually into the Middle East.

They needed someone who could bridge custody and hedge funds, so I moved into business development. Then came an offer to move to Dubai. I jumped at it. It felt like a continuation of everything I’d experienced up to that point – applying broader perspective and relationship-building skills in markets that were still evolving rapidly.

You’ve spent much of your career operating in markets away from company headquarters, often without the same level of infrastructural support. How do you navigate that?

In those situations you have to create the roadmap from scratch – deciding where the opportunity is and how your team’s focus should respond to it. You’re often interpreting incomplete signals and finding a way forward regardless.

That forces you to be adaptable, resourceful and comfortable operating without certainty. For me, that’s where creativity finally made sense. Not in the traditional form I grew up around, but in shaping direction where there isn’t yet a clear structure – building relationships, creating momentum, finding ways to move things forward.

That became my guide, professionally.

And then Pictet enters the story.

My next career signal came once again in that space between home and away: I was taxiing on the runway at Heathrow when I got a call from a friend, Ruth Mathouillot, who was in Pictet Asset Services at the time in Luxembourg.

She said, “There’s a role here with your name on it. You need to meet Claude Pech, the Head of Business Development and Client Relationship Management.” We met, and connected quickly. I also met Marc Pictet over breakfast in London. I remember being very direct with him – frank, and perhaps a little naïve to his family name above the door. I speak to people as people. We’ve had a strong rapport since.

You’ve been shaping the UK market for Pictet Asset Services from London since 2017, working closely with Luxembourg.

Yes – and this environment suits me. There’s scope to create, to expand and to translate relationships into something tangible. We’ve developed depth and breadth in the UK market over time, particularly with multi-family offices and external asset managers.

The relationship model is central to that. We take a very human approach – responsive, engaged and long-term in our thinking. Growth matters, of course, but it has to be sustainable. The objective is not simply scale – it’s quality, trust and longevity.

You’re close to clients. In a world defined by uncertainty, what are they really asking of you?

Clarity, and confidence. There’s a huge amount of noise – geopolitical, regulatory, structural. Our role is to interpret that. To apply intellectual rigour and turn complexity into something usable.

But beyond that, it’s about trust. We’re custodians not just of assets, but of confidence. Clients need to know that what they place with us is looked after with care and continuity.

And what stands out most from what you’ve achieved so far?

The impact we’re creating in the UK. We’ve established meaningful relationships across the market over a long time; some of our UK client relationships date back decades.

More recently, helping institutionalised single family offices, often in close collaboration with Pictet Wealth Management, has shown what’s possible when we operate as ‘One Pictet’. And ultimately, it comes back to people. The quality of the team, the mindset, the level of engagement – that’s what defines the experience clients remember.

Looking back, what emerges is not a predefined path, but a consistent way of moving through uncertainty.

Yes. It was never mapped out. But it wasn’t passive either. It was about recognising what was in front of me, and committing to it fully. Over time, that creates its own direction.

From his garden office at home, Rob works surrounded by objects that carry a different kind of inheritance – among them, a set of his grandmother’s pencils, worn down over time, the wood marked by the pressure of her grip. They are a quiet reminder that creativity takes many forms – and that it is something you return to, again and again, keeping it alive through use. For Rob, it found expression in shaping what did not yet exist – navigating uncertainty with judgement, adapting as circumstances changed, and creating something where there had once only been the hint of potential.

Give him a blank sheet of paper, and he will work it out.