Private bankers gathered in Sydney yesterday at the Australian Private Banking Conference to hear that they needed to move from a transactional to an advisory model, that high net worth customers don't see private banking as relevant and that high staff turnover made it hard to develop relationships with customers.Heard it all before? The line about how Australian private banking was evolving from red carpet retail to a European style advisory service was especially familiar. That evolution must have been going on for 20 years.Private bankers have an image problem and yesterday's conference confirmed that they are a long way from fixing it.At least the locals could take comfort from the news that private bankers in Asia and Europe are having just as hard a time.Standard Chartered Private global chief executive, Peter Flavel, said a recent survey of 1400 "future wealthy" commissioned by his bank found that people with US$1 to US$2 million to invest were keen to grow their wealth, were active and were prepared to move their money around.Flavel, who is based in Hong Kong, oversees 31 offices in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. His "core clients" have US$3 to US$25 million to invest.Flavel said: "Only 10 per cent of respondents saw private banking as their source of investment advice. Private banking is not relevant to our target market."The chairman of the Global Private Banking Council, Bruce Weatherill, said his group's research showed that only 15 per cent of private banking clients agreed with the proposition that a private banker was a trusted adviser.Only 29 per cent said their private bankers had done a good job during the financial crisis. More than 80 per cent were looking to take their business elsewhere.A survey of the local market by Investment Trends, the Centric Wealth High Net Worth Investor Report, found that private bankers played a role in the investment decisions of wealthy investors in less than 10 per cent of cases.High turnover is one of the industry's chronic problems. ANZ Private managing director Catherine McDowell said it took five to 10 years to develop a really good private banker but it was hard to keep people that long, especially young staff.