BBH’s Global Head of Investor Experience, David Weibe, brings a love of global interaction to his work as he connects with clients and investors across the globe to truly understand their priorities and needs. By relating personally with clients – learning their individual points of view and cultural considerations – David and team can help simplify the complex and deliver an exceptional client and investor experience.

What experience have you gained in your various roles at BBH?

Before joining Transfer Agency (TA) in 2019, I held roles in the Global Client Service and Fund Services, supporting the growth and globalization of BBH’s full-service book of business in Investor Services. Those roles gave me a good opportunity to travel and gain an appreciation for local cultures while also allowing me to develop my technical and client facing skills.

When I moved to Luxembourg in 2019 and joined TA, I was blown away by how dynamic the business line is in terms of the scope of the service and how we work so closely with investors and distributors, who are our clients’ customers. I learned early that I needed to look through many different lenses, balancing investor experience and client experience with regulatory and operational considerations. Our TA clients are trusting us with their investor relations, and those relationships are global, with different things to understand, whether it's operations, local laws or culture.

So, from an overall servicing experience perspective, there is a lot to balance and think about as we seek to offer a premium experience while ensuring we are not sacrificing control or the reputation of our clients.

How do your passions and interests inspire you on a day-to-day basis?

As well as travelling, I’m also passionate about music and soccer. These interests transcend geographies and have allowed me to connect personally with people, which helped me realize that there are endless angles and lenses through which a single topic can be viewed. So that mindset has helped in my interactions with our global TA teams and our clients and their investors. When dealing with someone new, whether it be a client, investor, or colleague, I'm instantly in learning mode to understand how they think about something and what their experience with it is.

How has that experience supported your client interactions?

As I’ve developed my own career, it became really clear to me that differentiating a service experience for a client or an investor requires us to understand what is outside of our specific desk or location.

Our goal is to simplify the complex or demanding. A critical piece of delivering meaningful solutions is listening, with empathy, to learn how something is impacting a client, investor, or distributor. For me, there's no greater satisfaction than using our expertise to solve what we initially thought was a complex problem.

How has that approach helped design solutions that support the investor experience?

In periods of high volatility, when there's a high correlation with volume, it’s important for us to have a stable model that can scale appropriately. From a human perspective, there’s added sensitivities when a client or investor is more anxious to get certain things done. We’ve been building tools for those parties that are intuitive and simple, so clients spend less time figuring out what's going on operationally, and more time focusing on those moments that can really bring a high degree of customer satisfaction or commercial benefit. Bringing that level of transparency and effective communication fosters a smoother overall experience for their investor.

Where is your favorite place to visit? How have you adapted your personal or professional approach depending on those cultural differences?

Each of the locations I have visited or spent time in have left a very unique impression with me. I have a special connection to Luxembourg as I lived there for more than three years and saw my kids experience their formative years there. It also offered me an immersive opportunity to learn the TA business, in which Luxembourg is a key business hub for the firm. Professionally, London is such a tremendous city and also offers the opportunity to engage with a significant number of our clients and also many key distributors. Personally, my favorite vacation spot during my time living in Europe was Mallorca.

From a cultural perspective, from 2010 to 2012, I got deeply involved in products distributing into Japan and I quickly learned how they value perfection and zero issues. Showing this level of understanding with a client immediately steered the conversation in a positive way when showing your respect for what is important to them from a quality perspective. Utilizing that same mindset across our broader business clearly sets BBH apart.

And finally, is there anything people might be surprised to know about you?

Yes, in my early 20s, I was hanging on to the wild dream of becoming a rock star. My drummer friend and I won an auction, and the prize was a day to collaborate with Billboard producer of the century Nile Rodgers. It was a super cool experience to work with someone so talented.