Coutts big player in Swiss banking

UPMARKET banker Coutts is making a big push into the secretive world of Swiss private banking with the £228m purchase of Zurich's Bank von Ernst.

It will make Coutts, banker to the Queen and much of the England football team, a significant player in the rapidly consolidating Swiss industry.

Coutts head Gordon Pell described Bank von Ernst as 'a good, solid, highly reputable operation' that would take Royal Bank of Scotland-owned Coutts into the 'first division, rather than the Premiership' of Swiss private banking. It has 21,000 wealthy Swiss clients and offices as far afield as the Uruguayan capital Montevideo and Miami.

Bank von Ernst was set up in 1869 and owned in the 1970s by British merchant bank Hill Samuel.