MANULIFE FINANCIAL CORP. of Toronto has launched a new business unit to compete directly against the country’s big bank-owned private banking operations for the attention of high net-worth individuals. Manulife Private Wealth will target those with $1 million or more of investible assets.

“There is a need for an alternative to the big banks,” says Bernard Letendre, vice president and managing director of Manulife Private Wealth.

“If someone was going to bring a service like this to the market, it had to be Manulife,” he says, “because apart from the big banks, who else already has all the capabilities?”

Manulife Private Wealth, a unit of Manulife Asset Management, will offer clients investment management as well as banking, trust, tax and estate, and other advisory services, all centred on the existing relationship between the Manulife financial advisor and his or her client, Letendre says.

“Our advisors have been telling us they have an opportunity to do more for their affluent clients, but they need to bring more to the table in terms of capabilities,” Letendre says. “And with Manulife Private Wealth, this is what we’ve just done.”

Manulife Private Wealth will offer discretionary asset management to clients who don’t want to be involved in decisions day-to-day.

“We won’t be for everyone,” Letendre says. “We are going for clients who are delegators, who want someone to help them and their families with the management of their affairs.”

However, Manulife Private Wealth won’t be offering concierge services _ the provision of all day-to-day financial administrative services to clients _ as some Canadian private banks do.

“We purposely and deliberately opted not to offer concierge services,” Letendre says. “We want to focus on areas where we are world class, such as investment management, where we can draw on the expertise of hundreds of our professionals around the world. And we want to focus on what matters to our clients, and frankly, concierge services are not what people are looking for.”

As of its mid-September launch, Manulife Private Wealth has only one branch, located at its Bloor Street East office in Toronto. But there are plans for a Vancouver office in early 2013 and an eventual rollout thereafter to other cities across the country.

“We will have a national footprint,” Letendre says.

Letendre has been building the Manulife Private Wealth team over the last 12 months, hiring, among others, Sam Sivarajan, formerly of UBS Canada, as head of investments for Manulife Private Wealth, and John Finnie, formerly of BMO Harris Private Banking, as head of banking and trust services.

All told, Manulife Private Wealth currently consists of about 20 staff, but there are plans for continued hiring, Letendre says.

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