Simon Coombes

Spear’s Review

A managing director at Goldman Sachs since 2017, Simon Coombes has spearheaded the bank’s relationships with entrepreneurs, business owners and other UHNWs across the Midlands in particular. It is a region that Coombes knows extremely well, having lived and worked there for almost three decades. 

His time at Goldman has coincided with a significant expansion of the bank’s presence in Birmingham. Having established a regional headquarters within the city in 2021, it now has a permanent base with several hundred staff. 

As part of its corporate citizenship work, meanwhile, it has also set the target of providing advice to 10,000 UK SMEs – a perfectly relevant initiative in the Midlands, given the region’s fast-growing economy.

Adviser Profile

Simon is a private wealth adviser at Goldman Sachs. He co-heads one of the teams within the UK business, focusing on business owners and entrepreneurs, often with a strong regional connection to the Midlands and the North. He also serves on the Private Wealth Management (PWM) Advisors Council within EMEA to help deliver on the most relevant issues for the PWM business in the region. 

Simon helps build the client base in the Midlands and the North of the UK, leveraging his background and experience in the area, and his existing networks from having worked and lived in the Midlands region since 1996. 

Simon joined Goldman Sachs in 2006 as an executive director in PWM and was named managing director in 2017. Prior to joining the firm, Simon worked at Coutts & Co Private Bank, initially working in the London office when he joined in 1995, and then relocating to the Birmingham office in 1996. From 1996 to 1997, Simon was an investment analyst at the firm, and from 1997 to 2006, he was an investment advisor and then senior private banker, building a large business and network of entrepreneurial private clients, many of whom were going through sale and exit transactions as the Management Buy Out and mid-market private equity deal-flow market became more established. 

Simon studied at the University of Grenoble from 1992 to 1993 and earned a BA in French, Economics, and Politics from Kingston University London in 1994.