Kate Turner has never been satisfied doing just one job. She’s always been itching to do more. Which is one reason why Kate, now responsible for Specialist Advice (tax, trust, estate and financial planning) and two private banking groups (Professionals and Fast Track who look after young, high achievers) came to Coutts.

She had been working for Deloitte & Touche as a tax specialist dealing with private clients for 13 years when she got the call from a head hunter. Did she want an interview with Coutts? Hmmm, maybe.

“I liked that my job at Deloitte was very much a relationship business but I looked at all the people who’d been there for 20 or 30 years and thought, oh dear, if I’m not going to get another job now, I’ll be here until I retire,” she admits. So Kate did the interview, got the job in 1998 and has been happy managing her patch and getting involved in various other initiatives ever since.

“Being in a bank is such a different culture, there’s a much wider range of individuals. In the professional firms, people come in as graduates and train to be accountants, so they’re very similar. I had trained to be a lawyer at university, liked studying tax in Deloitte and then thoroughly enjoyed bringing Coutts & Co’s tax department, which was somewhat quirky and old fashioned at the time, into the modern era.”

Such changes involved becoming much more commercial. Once up and running, she took on additional challenges, which included helping set up a back office for Coutts & Co’s flagship investment proposition, Orbita. This meant travelling across the world for 18 months visiting Miami, Bermuda, Cayman, Dublin – wherever the hedge funds and administrators were based.

Afterwards, she returned to her tax department to take over the trust and estates planning services. It was there that Kate came face-to-face with the only part of her job she’s been happy to sideline; being an attorney, where Coutts is made attorney to someone and responsible for making life decisions on their behalf.

On taking over the trust department, she found herself attorney to a client in her 80s with no close family or relatives and was suffering from senile dementia. “I’d have the house keeper ringing me up asking whether it was okay to replace the stair carpet because it was worn, and checking whether she should shop at Sainsbury’s or M&S. And I remember thinking, I don’t know!”

“I’d come in and say who I was, where I was from and start talking business. After a few seconds, she’d shout ‘Who are you?’ and I’d tell her again. Within a nanosecond, she’d ask me again. She was convinced she was still living in the war”

Kate visited the client periodically. “I’d come in and tell her who I was, where I was from and start to talk about her business. After a few seconds, she’d shout ‘Who are you?’ and I’d tell her again. Then, within a nanosecond, she’d ask me again! She was convinced she was still living in the war and kept asking about air raids, so there was no point trying to convince her otherwise.”

While Kate was on holiday, the client became seriously ill, and she arranged day and night nurses. The day she arrived back, the client died and the nurse rang asking ‘what do you want me to do with the body?’ ‘Pardon?’ Kate replied, ‘I work for a bank!’

“She told me that you can’t leave a body unattended overnight, so I got out the yellow pages and started looking for an undertaker in the Regent’s Park area. He said he’d be around the next day but I had no idea what to do in the meantime!”

Kate paid the nurse to stay overnight, cancelled her meetings for the next day and brought a young tax graduate with her the following morning to help sort things out. Expensive paintings and household goods, all insured by Coutts, had to be removed, along with organising the client’s safe journey to the morgue and funeral arrangements.

“‘Are you going to give me a hand?’ asked the undertaker. ‘Me?’ I said, ‘I work for a bank!’ ‘Well, my helper’s off sick, so if you want this to happen today, you’ll have to give me a hand’”

When the undertaker arrived, Kate got another shock. ‘Are you going to give me a hand?’ he asked. ‘Me?’ Kate said, ‘I work for a bank!’ ‘Well, my helper’s off sick’ he said, ‘so if you want this to happen today, you’ll have to give me a hand’.

“I thought, I’m a grown up, I can handle this, it’s not going to faze me. I got upstairs and my graduate, Chris, came pounding up after me, stepped in and helped carry her into the undertaker’s van. Talk about knowing your client. I had to take Chris for a very stiff brandy before heading back to the office to get everything arranged.”

It’s the sum of these kinds of experiences that has led Coutts to no longer offer the attorney service. “It’s an extremely personal position to be in,” she says, “you’re ultimately responsible for these people’s lives. I’d be agonising over things like the housekeeper turning out to be dishonest and the hairdresser that the client was fond of charging hundreds of pounds to wash and blow dry her few wisps of hair.

“I felt very sad about the whole situation. I was the only person in the world that cared about her and though I’d grown very fond of her over the time, I didn’t know anything about her. It’s probably one of the more traumatic things I’ve had to deal with,” she laughs now.

These days, Kate sticks to looking after her large number of employees, spread across Specialist Advice and Private Banking, though she still can’t resist getting involved in new, exciting initiatives such as internal projects on staff engagement, diversity programmes and the women’s initiative, attracting more women clients to Coutts.

Speaking about the future, one worry still pervades. “I want to get out while the going’s good,” she insists, laughing. “I don’t want to be that old dear moldering in the corner of the office with people saying ‘oh yes, she was useful once but now she’s gone barking mad.” Spend even five minutes in Kate Turner’s company and it’s quite evident that that is a long way off.

If you would like to contact Kate Turner directly on any tax, trust, estate or financial planning query, simply call her on 020 7753 1000 or email kate.turner@coutts.com

By Barbara Walshe