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Kicking things off with a bang, we revealed our Twenty Most Influential in Wealth Management list.

It’s a who’s who of some of the sector’s biggest names in Europe, from senior leaders at traditional wealth firms like St James’s Place, Rathbones and Julius Baer to private banking bosses at Citigroup and JPMorgan.

Also included are investment bankers who have worked on recent mega M&A deals in the space, including Rathbones’ merger with Investec’s UK wealth business, and a top private client lawyer.

Women remain severely underrepresented among the C-suite in wealth management. This gender imbalance is reflected in FN’s round-up, which features just five women.

That said, they are a deeply impressive bunch. A number of them — including Sasha Wiggins and Annabel Spring, Barclays’ and HSBC’s private bank and wealth bosses respectively  — are leading complicated restructurings as banks race to tap into the high-net-worth market.

Your call is important to us

You would think that for the City’s biggest lenders, expanding into wealth management would be a cakewalk.

As my colleague David Wighton recently noted, there is an obvious crossover given that clients of these firms’ investment banking arms “tend to be run by high-net-worth people who would be natural potential customers of their wealth arms”.

But it hasn’t panned out that way, he added, due to the challenges of getting siloed businesses — often with different strategies, different pricing methods, different regulatory requirements and different incentive structures — to work together.

Banks have been trying any number of things to grow their wealth franchises. Referral bonuses for investment bankers — reportedly being weighed at Goldman Sachs — sure, why not?

Citigroup, meanwhile, has started tracking how frequently its private bankers call clients.

The Financial Times reported earlier this year that Citi had started requiring private bankers to submit logs of every conversation they have with their clients and connect with them at least once every 90 days.

James Holder, who runs Citi Private Bank in Europe, defended the bank’s decision, telling FN this is not an unreasonable request.

“I find it intriguing that that’s even a story,” Holder told FN. “The consistent feedback for the whole industry is that clients want the engagement.”

Evelyn Partners: A Christmas cracker

Elsewhere, Julius Baer’s UK boss David Durlacher told FN he is quite happy for staff to work from home.

“The era of micro-management, of controlling, employees, I think, is over,” he told my colleague Justin Cash.

Lastly, my colleagues Edin Imsirovic and Justin Cash came through with a cracking scoop about the bid for Evelyn Partners’ professional services arm.

TA Associates, Bridgepoint and Goldman Sachs’s private equity arm have thrown their hats in the ring, according to people familiar with the matter, as bids for the unit enter a second round.

A deadline for final bids has been set for 2 December and Evelyn’s professional services business could fetch a valuation of £500m.

Write to Kristen McGachey at kristen.mcgachey@dowjones.com