Published 19th Jun 2026, 06:00 BST
When Glasgow businessman Owen Coyle won Scottish “EY Entrepreneur of the Year” last year with the co-founder of the business he runs, Union Technical, the accolade came with a reception held at 10 Downing Street.
The business, which specialises in renewable heating and insulation, has grown fast since it as set up 15 years ago. Coyle forecasts revenues of around £100 million next year, sharply up from £30m-£35m this year, driven by retrofitting social housing to improve energy efficiency. Union Technical recently partnered with social housing association Riverside Scotland to retrofit homes in Ayrshire – work that this week won recognition at the Scotland Energy Efficiency Awards.
“It’s all about timing, I suppose,” was Coyle’s self-effacing remark when I asked how he had built the business from its boot-strapped origins in solar panels.
Union Technical may not yet be a household name across Scotland. Yet the business is emblematic of the entrepreneurial success that is too rarely noticed, much less celebrated.
Nor does it fit with the often-downbeat narrative of Scotland’s business landscape. Entrepreneurs seem to be in a crouch position, held back by regulation, dysfunctional planning and a business rates system that “disincentivises investment”, as Sir Tom Hunter put it in his “Entrepreneurs Manifesto for Scotland”, published in January.
Then there is business flight, an issue on the minds of those in Scotland who chafe at the tax differential with England. A Scotsman Insider roundtable held this month at the offices of BGF, a private equity investor, added “weak storytelling” to the list of negatives.
Nonetheless, two things can be true at the same time. There is also a more positive story to be told – as Union Technical illustrates.
It’s a story that also explains why Julius Baer officially opened a new office in George Street, Edinburgh last night. The Swiss-based, global private bank was marking expansion in Scotland, where it set up its first presence in the capital in 2018. A Glasgow office followed in 2024.
Julius Baer is one of a number of wealth managers to have spotted a profoundly important trend in Scotland’s business landscape: the emergence of a new generation of founders following in the footsteps of the success stories of the 1980s and 1990s, including Sir Tom and his fellow knighted business colleagues Brian Souter, David Murray and Ian Wood.
LGT Wealth Management, part of the LGT group that’s owned by the princely family of Liechtenstein, opened its first presence in Scotland with an Edinburgh office in 2022. JP Morgan Private Bank has four “client advisers” in Glasgow and Edinburgh and plans to hire more over the next 12 months. UBS Wealth Management, part of Swiss-based bank UBS, opened an office in Edinburgh as far back as 2001.
Such firms are not just chasing the “old money” that’s long been the mainstay of the Edinburgh wealth management scene. They are focusing on the entrepreneurs running traditional engineering and manufacturing businesses, as well as those in emerging sectors that are redefining Scotland’s economy: renewable energy, logistics, life sciences, data centres and AI.
“We’ve seen a proliferation of wealth creation across these sectors in the last few years,” says Jonathan Dobbin, head of UK regions at Julius Baer.
His comment is echoed by others, including Debjani Raffan, head of Scotland, Yorkshire, Northeast and Northern Ireland at UBS Wealth Management, who says: “We see significant long-term potential in Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The country has a strong community of founders, business owners and families creating wealth across generations.”
Dobbin describes “an entrepreneurial ‘new money’ cohort”, especially around Glasgow, with Julius Baer opening its office there designed to “capture that entrepreneurial Scottish spirit that’s creating new wealth there”.
Nor is wealth restricted to the Central Belt. Dundee has its cluster of entrepreneurs in gaming, while Aberdeen is home to marine engineering businesses with origins in the 1970s oil boom. One is Balmoral Comtec, whose Milne family owners have just set up a family office after selling the business to a German group. Even Shetland is on the wealth management radar with its handful of families that have built valuable fishing franchises over generations.
Generational wealth transfer is a big driver. Wealth managers know they need to be where their clients are, rather than flying in from London. Julius Baer decided around 2017 to get much closer to where the wealth was being created, implementing a regionalisation strategy that saw offices open in Manchester and Leeds in 2017, and Newcastle in 2023.
“The wealth landscape is changing across the UK,” explains Dobbin. “People are now focusing on the transfers of wealth between generations and to really help understand the needs of clients on a day-by-day basis you need to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them in their local markets.” The bank requires at least £3 million in liquid assets to become a client.
Mark Wilson is an example of this dynamic. The Irish-born entrepreneur is founder of Hamilton-based clean energy infrastructure developer ILI Group, which is backing three proposed green hyperscale data centres in Fife, East Ayrshire and North Lanarkshire.
Like Coyle, Wilson recently became a Julius Baer client after being connected through EY Entrepreneur of the Year. He said wealth managers were “all relatively new to me” until recently, but that he needed one to help with the “generational wealth” he had been fortunate to accumulate.
Wealth management is likely to keep growing thanks to another trend that’s noticeable in Scotland, Dobbin says. “More families are willing to get the next generation involved sooner so they can get more used to the role they may play in the future as custodians of wealth.
“That conversation is now starting earlier.”
