* Established players see margins squeezed by client caution
* Clients parked cash at lowbrow banks during crisis
* Lowbrow rivals expand offering to retain rich clients
By Edward Taylor and Martin de Sa'Pinto
FRANKFURT/ZURICH, Oct 26 (Reuters) - Wealth managers like Credit Suisse and UBS, already struggling to raise private banking margins amid client caution, are faced with a new threat: lowbrow banks chasing wealthy customers.
Spooked by the credit crisis, some ultra-wealthy clients in Europe sought a safe haven for their cash away from wealth management firms with investment banking operations, and parked their money in low-end but conservative cooperative and savings banks instead.
Although the shift will likely prove to be temporary, it has given ultra-wealthy clients a lasting taste for the services -- and value -- offered by lowbrow banks at a time when big banks are seeking to defend their sagging margins.
"There is a general trend from Rolls-Royce banking to Skoda. That adds pressure to margins," said Peter Thorne, banking analyst at Helvea.
In its wealth management division, excluding the Americas, UBS saw gross margins drop to 89 basis points in the third quarter, from 95 basis points in the second quarter, and down from 92 basis points in the third quarter 2009.
A similar trend is evident at Credit Suisse, where the gross margin in wealth management fell to 118 basis points in the third quarter, down from 131 basis points for full year 2009.
Credit Suisse said lower margins stem mainly from a lack of demand for high margin services, and that the Swiss bank is "ideally positioned" to benefit when the environment improves.
LOWBROW OFFERING
Bread-and-butter banks like cooperative lender DZ Bank are aggressively expanding their wealth management offerings in a bid to retain the wealthy client base.
"The Lehman failure and other bank rescues led many clients to return to the bank around the corner," said a WGZ Bank spokesman.
Between 2008 and 2009, cash deposits among the 30 million clients of Germany's cooperative banking sector jumped 29.8 percent to 203 billion euros, data shows.
A similar jump of 30 percent in cash deposits is evident among the savings banks, according to data from the DSGV industry association, though not all of this is from clients defecting from the big wealth managers.
The push by smaller German banks to increase their service offerings mirrors a similar pattern seen in Switzerland where cantonal banks successfully expanded their wealth management product offering.
Assets under management at Banque Cantonale de Geneve (BCGE) rose to 18 billion Swiss francs in 2009 from 16 billion francs a year earlier. Net new money accounted for 1 billion francs of the increase.
Zuercher Kantonalbank (ZKB) launched a physically backed gold exchange traded fund (ETF) in 2006. The Swiss-German lender now has 7.7 billion Swiss francs in that product, and a total of 10.2 billion francs in its precious metals ETFs.
From the end of 2008 to mid 2010, assets under management at ZKB grew more than 17 percent to 156 billion Swiss francs. Net new money was 6.7 billion francs for 2009 and 5.3 billion francs in the first half of 2010, more than half from private clients.
MONEY RETURNS
Despite shrinking margins, UBS reported positive inflows in its Wealth Management division in the third quarter, after losing client money in the first half of 2010, and in the previous two years.
"Sparkassen provided a safe haven for high net worth individuals," said Josef Stadler, head of high net worth individuals at UBS. "Money is flowing back to banks that can cater to sophisticated needs."
But the presence of the lowbrow players will ensure that margins in wealth management will continue to come under pressure in some of the key markets where UBS and Credit Suisse are seeking to expand, like Germany, Europe's largest economy.
Thanks to a raft of regulatory changes seeking to clamp down on tax evasion, wealthy clients are increasingly being encouraged to bank locally, a trend that is crimping the traditionally higher "offshore" margins.
For decades Switzerland high end banks relied heavily on the traditional "offshore" business -- whereby clients from abroad move their money to the alpine nation.
Clients taking advantage of offshore services tended to place a premium on sophisticated and higher margin services such as currency hedging and direct market access trading, as well as on client confidentiality, but that premium is now shrinking.
"There will have to be convergence between onshore and offshore margins," said Leigh Robertson, Chief Financial Officer of HSBC private bank.
Local banks won't give up their gains without a struggle, and some say they are managing to keep hold of their financial crisis spoils.
Said a BCGE spokesman: "The money coming in has slowed since the crisis began to abate, but it is not going back out." (Editing by Sitaraman Shankar)