Wealthy open multiple bank accounts in crisis

GENEVA (Reuters) - The world's wealthiest are opening multiple accounts to help spread risk through the global financial crisis, their bankers say.

"Clients who had accounts with three institutions now have six accounts. Clients who had six accounts now have 12 accounts," Gerard Aquilina, vice chairman of Barclays Wealth (BARC.L: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), told the Reuters Wealth Management Summit in Geneva.

Aquilina said he even had one client with 21 accounts with 50 million British pounds ($88 million) in each of them.

Patrick du Saint, head of private banking in Switzerland for BNP Paribas (BNPP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), said he saw the same trend.

"The direction of our clients is mainly that if they have their money in one major bank they want to share it. What they are doing is splitting their assets among more banks," du Saint said.

Switzerland's UBS (UBSN.VX: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), the world's largest wealth manager, has seen big client withdrawals after it was hit early on in the crisis by its exposure to toxic mortgage assets.

But Juergen Zeltner, who heads UBS' wealth management operations in North, Central and Eastern Europe, said customers were not closing their accounts.

"Very few clients have terminated their relationship ... There have been billions of outflows in the second quarter but that doesn't mean clients leave the house. It means they are diversifying their money," he said.

(Reporting by Emma Thomasson; Editing by David Cowell)

(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)

(For more on the Reuters Wealth Management Summit, see [ID:nWEALTH]