The man who crowned himself king of Coutts

The Monday Interview: Gordon Pell has discovered more than one way of achieving his ambitions

Gordon Pell used to be intent on becoming chief executive of a FTSE 100 company, but now he is not so sure. As the head of retail banking at the mighty Royal Bank of Scotland, with direct responsibility for the prestigious Coutts private banking brand, Mr Pell sees his responsibilities and status as comparable to those of a typical FTSE chief of only a few years ago.

At the same time, Mr Pell is more than happy to extend his duties. When Coutts' chief executive, Andrew Fisher, quit in December for a job in venture capital, Mr Pell installed himself as the replacement, making him bank manager to the Royal family, Premier League football players and a host of pop stars. Being "in the top three at Europe's second largest bank", as Mr Pell puts it, has its compensations.

"Coutts was already part of my business at RBS," he says. "The problem was that if I brought in someone else, that person was going to come with their own views and their own strategy and quite frankly we can do without that."

Mr Pell is taking the reins at Coutts as the 320-year-old bank stands at a crossroads. Coutts was struggling when Mr Fisher came in as a consultant in 1997, but was soon experiencing a renaissance. Mission accomplished, Mr Fisher's role risked becoming, in Mr Pell's view, a "status quo" job that lacked adrenalin.

"Andrew, when all was said and done, was the chief executive of a small division. As well as being the director of a small division I'm also a director of the bank. They've now got a very big gun 'on site' as one might say," he says.

So what does Mr Pell see himself doing for Coutts? He cannot afford to focus exclusively on strategy. In its history, the bank has served William Pitt, the Duke of Wellington and King George III. The high net worth clients of today – Coutts has 70,000 – expect to know the top man personally, and it is not unusual for Mr Pell's Monday morning to be spent in the country shooting with some of them. (Coutts managers who deal with landowners have just been on a farming course, so they can have "sensible discussions" with their clients).

But there are grand plans all the same. Mr Pell aims to jazz up Coutts and make it more pro-active in recruiting customers. "The danger is that Coutts is seen as traditional money, which it's not," he muses. "We've now got to take the message and put it on the street. Only our street is not the high street, it's Sloane Square."

This evangelism will mean modernising what is arguably one of the most powerful brands in European banking. The dining rooms at Coutts' headquarters in the Strand have been refurbished to provide a "crisp, modern feel", using the "best of modern British cutlery". It is about making Coutts more "Gordon Ramsay than Simpson's-in-the-Strand", Mr Pell suggests, contrasting one of the current hottest chefs to one of the most traditional old chop houses.

And 2002 could hardly be a better time to make the push. Sure, RBS and Coutts already have one-third of the market for customers with £100,000 to spare, and indirect relationships with another third. But Mr Pell sees little competition for the remaining third just now.

He explains: "Someone said to me the other day: 'We're feeling a bit challenged at the moment.' And I said: 'I'm not sure you can spell the word.' There's a two-year window here where Coutts is the only player on its front foot – because of the way the stock market's gone, because of the amount of money that's been wasted in wealth management by some of our competitors, and because of the natural desire of the Americans to go home and ditch everything outside the heartlands at the first sign of trouble."

Against that backdrop, the Coutts brand can really go to work. "I don't think a clearing bank brand is capable of [attracting high net worth customers]. And I speak with experience of two of them," he points out, referring to his previous life at Lloyds TSB and NatWest.

After 29 years with Lloyds, he joined NatWest in 2000 when it was fighting off takeover bids from RBS and Bank of Scotland. It was a huge gamble: most observers said he would be sacked if NatWest fell to either bidder. But he ended up on the board of the victorious RBS.

Do Lloyds' ambitions in wealth management pose a threat to Coutts? "They've ground to a halt", Mr Pell says dismissively.

OK, Barclays then? "It's not a wealth management brand in its own right," he intones.

Meanwhile, there is scope to shift Coutts investment products, which nowadays even include hedge funds, through the wider NatWest and RBS branch networks. "We've basically resprayed [Coutts investment products] and we are selling them for a less sophisticated market, people with £100,000 up to £300,000," he says. "We will respray anything where we can get it into a different customer base."

Mr Pell takes two holidays a year. Not just the usual family break, but also a week on his own away from his wife and children as well as the office. He will jet off to Botswana on a riding holiday, while Mrs Pell – one of the City's top insurance lawyers – retreats to the Dartington College of Arts to practise the piano.

What of Mr Pell's ambitions to head a FTSE 100 company? He declared the goal during the NatWest bid, and since then consolidation has seen the number of major UK financial firms fall from 20 to fewer than 10 much larger players.

"I'm reasonably well-known. People talk to me," he hints. "The top two or three people in the bigger banks have got much bigger jobs nowadays and quite frankly are as well paid as chief executives were before. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat."