The Anatomy of Private Banking

Closing the chapter of a five year tenure as CEO of the Singaporean bank of a Swiss asset management group, I wanted to share the main vectors of the perspective I developed on this segment of the financial services industry before embarking on the exciting next stage of my career.??

For the title of this paper, I use the word “anatomy” on purpose: an observation of the structure and internal workings.??Some people will, based on their experience or inspired by the painting, suggest that private banking will soon deserve an “autopsy”, having succumbed to fintech, on-line brokers, robo-advisors and crypto currencies or its own lack of value added.??Nothing could be further from the truth.?

Private bank is a polymorph concept.??

The name on the door covers very different realities, so let’s get this out of the way. Some institutions offering a lounge area with tea and biscuits for clients with $500,000 to deposit their hard-earned cash into (under-) remunerated savings accounts will call the service “Private Banking”.??Others will help you to invest $20,000,000 with them in specific Private Equity opportunities, offer to lend you money against your stake in a listed family business and provide you estate planning advice while shipping your vintage car free of charge for you to mingle with fellow millionaire enthusiasts over an all-expenses paid rally in the Alps.

The origin of the “Private” qualification for “Banks” arose for different reasons in different places and times, referring to their purpose (to deal with the wealth of a single family), their legal form (being owned and run by private individuals) or their attributes of discretion and even secrecy.

Some institutions are old-style partnerships where the proprietors bear personally and unlimited responsibility for the liabilities of the bank, while others are divisions of listed financial behemoths.

For the rest of this paper, the private bank (“PB”) will have the following characteristics:

-???????A regulated institution licensed as a bank, and providing the services thereof,

-???????Benefits from a physical infrastructure as well as an electronic one (“Bricks and Clicks”),

-???????Geared towards either providing advice or being delegated the management of assets in general, with a focus on financial assets, and?

-???????Delivers a personalised contact and bespoke service to individual clients (rather than institutions) belonging to the high net worth individual (HNWI) or ultra high net worth individual (UHNWI) category[1].

A Private Bank’s Purpose?

????????????Adding value, maintaining continuity

At its core, a PB should work towards preserving and increasing its clients’ assets, within their accepted risk envelope.??This should be done profitably in order for the broad infrastructure (anything from staff to research to buildings to equity holders) to remain sustainable and stable overtime.

As explained below, banks must add genuine value yet this can be done in a multitude of ways.??Whether the service offering is broad ranging or niche, from specialised investment funds in US high yield bonds or Indian equities, from aggressively margined accumulators to lending against promotor stock or structuring balanced bond and equities portfolios, what is needed for success is hard work and top notch talent.?

Investment is a process that not only requires the initial decision, but one that must be adjusted overtime as a function of changes in the market environment, the validation or indeed failure of some choices made or the evolution of a client’s circumstances.?

The “smash n’ grab” approach, the indiscriminate “hard sell” of hardly suitable products or the mere mark-up of existing instruments will not work in the long run...and often fails earlier than that.

PBs should also be the catalyst, with internal or external expertise, for an optimisation of the holding structure of a client’s assets; locally, they should be attuned to tax optimisation opportunities and help clients side-step inefficiencies such as double taxation of dividends or stamp duties to name two.?

????????????Stability

The stability of an institution is something too easily forgotten.??Time travel would be needed to bring clients of bailed-out banks back to the anxious state they may have been in when the Great Financial Crisis hit in 2008.??While the direct exposure to a PB’s balance sheet is limited for Wealth Management clients, a weaker bank’s restricted liquidity will impact its ability to support its clients through lending.??Furthermore, there will be an adverse selection where the best performers will be weary of tying their fate to that of their employers and leave for better offers, creating a disruption for the bank staff and its clients alike.

Clients should never forget that the activities of PBs, as regulated entities, are subject to substantial prudential supervision, requirement for capital reserves, procedures for client protection and infrastructure standards to minimise operational risk.??This is a source of comfort for clients and justifies paying a premium over similar services offered by other providers.

Institutions with physical presence and accessible human structures will remain a haven in choppy markets where the internet is down and the helpline of your on-line broker is unmanned.

????????????Meeting the clients’ (real) objectives

The key challenge is to understand the client’s objectives, investment horizon and risk tolerance.??The real objectives. Because clients will often have an unrealistic view of their “sang froid” when markets take a nosedive, panic and change an otherwise perfectly valid strategy at the worst moment.??Others will be lured by the appeal of a rising stock incompatible with the agreed-upon strategy and alter their risk profile.??A dialogue of trust, transparency and empathy is key.??Good private bankers will have the bandwidth to gain a thorough understanding of their client’s objectives and then convey their recommendations in an intelligible and technically correct way, taking into account the fact that such clients may come from a range of academic, business and cultural backgrounds.

Investment Strategy and Products

????????????Strategic Long Term Analysis

“If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” applies to your investment strategy.??It is up to every PB to develop a vision of how investable asset classes are going to perform over the long term, and just as importantly, how that performance correlates with that of other asset classes.??This last point will be key to create portfolios optimising risk and return.??A remarkable example of this is the work of Christophe Donay, head of Macro Research and Asset Allocation at Pictet: the “Horizon” 10-year forecast.??From macro-trends to individual asset class returns, from geopolitical shifts to global commodity supply and demand landscape, he arranges nuggets of information into a coherent mosaic depicting what our future could be, with financial asset prices a mere consequence of expected real world developments.

Once a suitable strategy is identified, two questions will emerge when it comes to implementation: “active or passive management” and “in-house vs third party products”.??

On the subject of active vs passive management…

The size of funds managed under either approach speaks for itself.??What is certain is that active asset management is needed to have properly functioning markets, as elegantly put by Renaud de Planta in an interview with the Financial Times[2]

Can a bank survive on passive management of funds offering only third party products? Yes, but the value added will then mainly lie in the asset allocation or the structuring of the client’s estate.??

????????????Product Expertise?

It is obvious that not all banks can be experts in all of the fields of investment.??Some banks’ expertise merely lies in the selection of other banks or fund managers’ products, and if this is done with the investor’s performance and risk/return profile in mind, this is an interesting (albeit limited) value proposition in its own right.

Other banks focus on providing asset management for instrument-, geographic- or sector-specific segments (e.g EM bonds or levered structured products), and have world-class teams to do so.?

Discretionary portfolio management (“DPM”), where a client lets his PB manage his money with no other input that a strategy and risk/return agreed at inception of a mandate, is the bedrock of the industry and its “raison d’être”: if you made a fortune in an industrial venture, keep focusing on your area of expertise and let an expert bank assist you manage the wealth you created.??Division of labour, Adam Smith-style.

Performance is evidenced by comparison with a suitable benchmark, and/or various established industry awards and rankings.

When proposing less liquid investments (such as private equity) to their clients, PBs have often put their money where their mouth is.??It is not uncommon to see the owners of these institutions invest for their own account alongside their clients.??For listed companies, employee funds or incentive plans act as anchor investor in such ventures.??As a client, these behaviours are always a source of comfort as it guarantees a degree of due diligence and reporting accuracy that often lacks in “fire-and-forget” third party investments procured by a PB.??

Without putting too fine a point on it, “quality is remembered long after price is forgotten”.??Paying fair management fees for a reliable discretionary portfolio management strategy or a top quartile bond fund is the smartest investment you can make.?????

Family Governance

While more of a “soft product”, a number of PBs offer advice on family governance, inter-generational wealth transmission and even philanthropy.??It is not unheard of to have a banker acting as go-between for feuding family members, or refining a consensus on which charitable cause matters most to them and deserves their support.??Experienced PB stakeholders will never be shy to ask or answer the question: “What does wealth mean to you?”.

In that context, asset holding structure should be discussed to ensure efficiency from a tax, inheritance tax or stamp duty perspective. The expertise may lie in-house or external.

Private bank and investment bank or asset manager under the same roof – Conflict of interest?

This is probably the Gordian Knot of the banking industry.??

Private Banking provides stable revenues and absorbs investable assets. Investment banking??(“IB”) or asset management (“AM”) do create such assets on the primary or secondary market. The osmosis between the two and the potential for a beneficial cross-pollination is obvious in areas such as client acquisition, risk management, product structuring, or custody.??It is worth noting that Research is an exception to this cooperation as it fulfils two different functions at PBs and AMs on one hand, and IB on the other, commonly referred to as “Buy Side” and “Sell side” for self-explanatory reasons.

From a confidentiality, consistency and efficiency perspective, an entrepreneur planning an IPO will find that the PB affiliated to the IB leading the underwriting process can provide a seamless team to manage the wealth so crystalized, help plan tax matters or lend, using his stock as collateral, to purchase the property he eyed for a long time, without diluting his stake in the company.?

Asset Managers will find that their Private Banking colleagues can source seed capital for new private equity funds that they want to launch.

This is a two-way street: private bankers can also, within the right compliance framework, source orders for a new bond issue to allow their Investment Bankers to present a solid lead order to a prospective issuer in order to secure a role as Lead Underwriter for a capital markets transaction.

Every one of these examples can result in a win-win situation for the client and the bank, where the opportunity set is enhanced for the former and the revenue pool is expanded for the latter.??

Yet that idyllic vision has been blurred by the occasional but resounding failure.??

Private banking clients have been “stuffed” with bonds underwritten by their sibling IB seeking to re-finance an unwanted loan exposure, only to watch these to sour after only a few months.

Investment Bankers have incurred material losses delaying ever so slightly the liquidation of collateral on margin loans at the behest of their more “relationship-oriented” Private Banking colleagues.

Though less of an occurrence now, private bankers have been incentivised to sell non-descript funds managed in-house rather than better-performing competitors’ funds paying a lower retrocession of fees.

The list goes on.

There is no doubt that if well executed, and with the right checks and balances in place, a holistic approach to the financial sphere and the integration under a same corporate roof of IB, AM and PB benefits PBs and their clients.??

Regulators have imposed a range of safeguards to prevent mishaps, but there are two keys to success: open architecture on one hand, and strong institutional ethics on the other.

Pitfalls for PBs and their clients

For banks, the major issue I have observed is the focus on marginal revenue. The complexity of the private banking business makes for a difficult allocation of unit costs.??As such, the focus has historically been on marginal revenue and AuM[3], leading to pricing concessions which debase the value proposition of a PB to meet some random yet lucrative “scorecard” metrics for the individual banker, his manager or the CEO. Lower marginal revenues and higher marginal costs on new business is rarely a recipe for success.???????

Clients often view having several PBs as a risk diversification, oblivious to the fact that one bank may take a market stance being the opposite of another and effectively cancel it out.??The focus of clients on fees – in particular in Asia – overrides qualitative or even performance considerations and has been a deplorable market evolution, often self-inflicted, as strong players under-sell their capabilities instead of standing by the value of the service they provide.?

Last, too many private investors answer to the sirens’ song of leverage.??The single biggest aberration I have witnesses in my career is investors not realising that leverage was not free money to turbo-charge returns, but instead a mere shift towards an (often inefficient) other point on a portfolio’s risk return distribution.??This point could often be reached (or improved upon) with an unlevered combination of other asset classes.??If you are lucky enough to read Andrew MacPherson[4]’s “Spinnaker” presentation on the topic, you will fully understand the theoretical construct behind this statement.??However, enough investors have experienced losses (and margin calls) on portfolios in March 2020 to understand what I mean.

Technology

Over the next few years, technology will have a disproportionate impact on PBs, despite the continued need for and focus on human interaction.??Clients deserve their bank to deliver a contemporary suite of tools that allows them to get the best understanding of their wealth and access thereto.?

As an example, the architecture of PBs is comparatively light on risk management: most clients are “long only” and wholly funded by their own net worth rather than debt requiring Asset and Liability management techniques.??A number of global players have outsourced individual client risk management modules to companies such as Privé Technologies[5], led by Julian Schilliger, a former JP Morgan employee.

Confidentiality remains a concern for many PB clients.??So how do you get an aggregated view of several portfolios held at different institutions without having to spend all-nighters populating your home-made Excel spreadsheet???Canopy Pte[6], founded by a Deutsche Bank alumni Tanmai Sharma and benefiting from the support of Credit Suisse, has the answer and provides an efficient and easy-to-use consolidated reporting platform.

BNP Paribas, though the voice Stephane Vermeire, its GM for Wealth Management in Belgium, is a strong advocate of Paxfamilia[7], a genuine “wealth management” (rather than asset management) electronic platform allowing clients to have not only a consolidated view of their assets, but also a perspective on the fiscal implications of their holding structure.??Furthermore, it provides an encrypted e-repository for family documents such as wills or other notarized deeds, complementing the services of the Private Bank.

Nipping at the heels of PBs are start-ups like Netwealth[8], set-up by Charlotte Ransom, a former Goldman Sachs partner. This company inserts discretionary portfolio management in a UK-specific wealth planning framework encompassing pensions, wrappers or the efficient use of Individual Savings Accounts.??The company does not have a banking license but is regulated by the FCA in the UK as a Limited License firm and provides substantial disclosure which gives investors with a further degree of comfort.???

On-line banking does not intrinsically belong to PBs.??On-line execution facilities can be presented to clients to allow them to trade online, but they negate the key value proposition of PBs which is the advisory function.??By the same token, the technological sophistication and data content of leading on-line brokers is simply too hard to duplicate cost efficiently.?Directionally, the same comments would apply to robo-advisors.??They do have a function, but for a different type of clientèle.

Even the largest PBs can’t allocate resources to develop these tools in-house and use them exclusively.??In the “build-or-buy” contest, the former loses ground as the latter allows for across-the-market scale and overcomes the still present yet fading concern about cyber-security.?

?Afraid of M&A?

Many academic studies highlight the non-conclusive nature of the expected benefits of acquisitions.??Clearly, with easier access to information, the globalisation of the investment sphere and the increased burden of regulation, scale becomes a prerequisite for a successful PB business.??M&A is can offer a fast track to critical mass.

Private banking is a “peoples’ business dealing with people” and the nature of client base as well as the incumbent culture will trump any number crunching prediction when it comes to actual success of an acquisition.??

As a client, having your banking partner being sold or taken over should be good news: a more committed owner is taking the helm, with the firm intention of keeping and expanding what she paid for: your business, underpinned by your trust and satisfaction.??There are many examples of successful, bite-sized acquisitions in this industry.??LGT, an active and discreet player, has been involved in a steady stream of successful acquisitions[9].??At its helm, Prince Maximilian von Liechtenstein is thereby ensuring the perennity of the bank into its second century of existence.??

Other banks have taken over distressed or scandal-stricken rivals, with mixed results.

Which Financial Centre?

As regulations evolve to protect a bank’s customers and a local investment bias remains -often for legitimate reasons such as currency matching or need for regular in-person contact-, a local or regional presence is necessary to service them.

Regulations have led to so-called “cross-border rules”, making it difficult for banks to operate in one country and service clients in another.??As an example, US client served by Swiss bank will only have access to a fraction of the services the product offering available to their domestic customers.??This is to avoid falling foul of restrictions imposed in the US on how foreign banks can petition clients under their jurisdiction.

As much as possible, banks and clients are now incentivized to do business domestically or at least regionally.??

It is beyond dispute that in the IB world, New York and London are, to this day, the centres where you can find the most talent and expertise. The headquarters of the leading players and the nexus of law firms, accountants revolving around them is simply unmatched.

In the PB world, Switzerland remains the gold standard.??A 2019 Euromoney ranking lists 6 US banks amongst the world’s top 10 PBs, but when it comes to quality, only 2 make the cut against 4 Swiss PBs.??Tradition and history have feathered the bed of Swiss PBs, 70 years of banking secrecy have compounded the opportunity, but to their credit the culture and know-how has been honed over the years and leveraged to the full, resulting in their standing at the top of the heap.???

In Europe, Luxembourg is not as preeminent on the PB scene as it was before the Automatic Exchange Of Information (“AEOI”) revolution, but instead has grown into the preeminent place in Europe in the Fund Management and Administration space. London will play second fiddle to Zurich and Geneva[10], dwarfed when it comes to managing off-shore assets.??

While the MIFID European regulations have changed the industry since 2014 with an emphasis on investor protection, Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia have been pursuing parallel paths with the major tailwind of an active government support programme.??In these jurisdictions, you will find strong banking regulations, exacting standards for the licensing of bankers and excellent investor protection framework.??Both jurisdictions benefit from a lenient and simple tax environment, friendly to “in-patriate” money, putting them behind Switzerland but ahead of all other global off-shore financial centres[11].??Family Offices benefit from a government-wide push, solving tax, immigration and legal stability issue in one fell swoop.??

The US PB industry is more diffuse in terms of centres, but suffers from a burdensome tax environment which is off-putting for non-domestic money.

Compliance, Money Laundering & all

Before the AEOI, the improved cooperation of financial crime task forces across borders and the globalisation of investors asset holding structures, money laundering and tax evasion were more difficult to identify and prosecute.

The arm of the law reaches further than ever, even across borders.??Explicit regulations have forced banks to actively scan for any criminal activity at every stage of a banking relationship, from background checks to transaction patterns analysis.

Where fraud occurs within a PB, it will in the vast majority of the cases be an employee-related issue rather than a systemic failure or nefarious intent at the institutional level.??This is a positive development, but it comes with an expected corollary: individual accountability.??Offending bankers (rather than their employers) can be fined, barred from the industry and even jailed for their actions.??

Banking and markets supervisors across the world have put an emphasis on investor protection.??The cost of the ensuing regulations can’t be under-estimated and burdens banks and investors alike but the framework currently in place in the major financial centres provides outstanding protection against divergences from risk parameters and tolerances as expressed by clients.

Careers

????????????A solid career path

There is of course a bright future for tech-savvy professionals in hoodies coding AI programmes to model consumer behaviour or shopping-predicting algorithms. Not being outdone, private banking will continue to offer great career opportunities for individuals with a solid financial background, the drive to keep abreast with regulations and product development through the course of their career.??At a later stage, this may even be a good springboard to drop the tie, put on the hoodie and lead the next Fintech unicorn (See “Technology” below).

As the markets and products get more complex, as client situations cover several jurisdictions and family members, or blend the (listed) family business and the individual wealth, the successful professionals will be team players capable of harnessing the strength of their organisation.?

Diversity

At Pictet in Singapore, I was immensely proud to have women making up two third of the headcount.??Among these, our most successful senior private bankers, the head of the legal department, the head of human resources, the CEO of the Asset Management business, a market group head and countless talented professionals and even … my successor as CEO.??

To me, this stems from three factors.??First, the visibility of the individual commercial performance makes the environment a genuine meritocracy. EQ is crucial: bankers and clients gravitate towards each other on the basis of trust, competence but also cultural and personal affinities. Next, compared to other careers, from being an ER doctor to an investment banker, the pace of work is more compatible with a healthy family life. Last but not least, according to the World Bank, the baseline for female employment is high in Singapore, at 41% of the workforce. This speaks to sound societal fundamentals such as equal education opportunities and the strength and support of multi-generation family cells.??Yet at 66%, we were outpacing the national average by 25%.?

As soon as you create a human level playing field, which I believe this industry segment does, there is little need for affirmative action or promotion quotas of any sort: women or other diverse candidates reach their rightful potential naturally.??This being said, we need to continue nurturing diversity through fair and stormy weather alike and never take it for granted.?

Remuneration

As touched upon above, setting bankers’ remuneration is fraught with conflicts: the more profitable products for a bank to sell may not be the most suitable for your all your investors.??Bankers need to balance the need to pay their own mortgage with what is best for their clients.??There is, using an Edgeworth Box reference, a point of mutual advantage, or in layman’s terms, a win-win situation where the banker offers his unbiased advice and the client pays a fair fee for the bundle of services received. In a nutshell, as a manager, a banker or a client: be long term greedy[12].??It is a crucial and challenging part of a PB manager’s job to ensure that this balance is found.??UCAP’s Chairman Nagendra Y. N. shared some interesting considerations on fair pay[13], as does Mary Erdoes, CEO of JP Morgan Chase’s asset and wealth management business when it comes to long working hours[14].???

The Future

A more technologically advanced sector

PBs will have to keep up with financial innovation and the relentless progress of technology with its array of analytical tools, to offer the most relevant and accurate advice to clients.

Visualise your wealth vectors in 3D? Sure.??Simulate your retirement net worth based on earnings, historical market crashes, a modicum of leverage and global economic growth to make decisions based on acceptable outcomes? Absolutely. Backtest your portfolio’s structure using robo-advisor technology? Done.???Include your medical history to define the horizon of your wealth accumulation? Why not???Get portfolio alerts on the windscreen of your car (passenger seat of course)???Déjà vu.

????????????Products, products…

PBs will be a key actor in the “financialization” of new asset classes as they go mainstream.??A lot of work has already been done to bring the world of private equity within reach of HNW (rather than UHNWI) individuals investors with reasonable risk diversification through managed funds. Soon, carbon credits and pools of residential real estate will be bought and sold on regular exchanges as liquid securities and become part of mainstream portfolios.?

But wealth management and estate planning will evolve further.??A somewhat far-fetched illustration of this could be the fictional dystopian world where the writer Jacques Attali broaches the concept of people “mortgaging their DNA”[15]. Could large pools of DNAs become a speculative item as insurance companies or big pharma will become better at data-mining these???Would this be an asset class broadly de-correlated from the economic cycle… and become investable?

????????????Crypto Currencies (“CC”) and Blockchain?

Crypto Currencies as a “free from government” reliable electronic store of value is the wrong answer to a real problem: governments do often appear as fickle stewards of the economy. Deficits, inflation, unmanageable pension obligations, unbridled monetary support to compensate the hardships of the COVID crisis are a cause of long term concern.??Which household sits down on January 1st?and discusses financial planning for the year in these terms: “Darling, this year I expect to earn 100, so we can afford to spend 103”???That is a 3pc deficit.??If it does not make sense for a household, why would it for governments[16]???

The majority of crypto currencies in their current form have too many shortcomings: wallet hacks, the lack of liquidity, the high volatility, the logic of “mining” and related energy consumption, governments’ vocal adverse stance, the absence of investable instruments such as bonds or equities denominated in CC and the lack of that quality discretely printed on banknotes: a legal tender for “all debts, public charges, taxes and dues”.??Their allure is certainly noteworthy, and their foray into the mainstream such as accounting for as much as USD1.5 billion of Tesla’s treasury[17]?points at their relevance to our future world. But it is hard to see how, today, this asset class is compatible with a PB’s fiduciary duty to preserve investors’ assets. The co-founder of Ethereum concurs: “[Crypto] is really a small percentage of what the world needs”[18].

That is why gold still takes pride of place in many standard portfolios, despite being labelled “n[ot] of much use “ by Warren Buffet[19].??

Look at the Rembrant painting at the top of this article.??The good doctor delivering the anatomy lesson is Dr. Tulp (Tulip in English).??The Dutch tulip bulb market bubble is never far away[20].

But here is the counterpoint: in a world where the private sphere shrinks at an alarming rate, and with the near extinction of physical cash, there is a demand for anonymity and privacy. So I believe you will see Blockchain-enabled crypto-currencies in an asset-backed, audited format, presenting a more balanced mix of stability, return (hence investability) and anonymity. “Crypto” means “hidden”, after all. Will PBs use it???Only if you can prove where it came from – the flipside of anonymity.

Blockchain on the other hand, the technology that underpins CC and a myriad of other systems has a bright future ahead of it.??For starters, the end of 3 days being allegedly needed to transfer SGD from a premier London bank to a premier Singapore bank[21].

Of course, areas of application are endless, from further securing the transactions you would conduct on your mobile phone to allowing you to confirm the purchase of plot of land in Malta from your home office in Hawaii.?

Communication between client and its bank, document certification and other more mundane yet important tasks will greatly benefit from it.

ESG[22]?Investing?

The ubiquity of ESG financial assets is irreversible.??Global news networks and activists of all hues leave few places to hide for companies using unethical, inhumane or ecologically damaging practices to conduct their business, and investors take notice.??PBs will need to work harder to be part of the gatekeeping eco-system by being clear with their clients as to the ESG standard of their portfolios, and hold the external certification providers to account for the thoroughness of their work.??

Conclusion

A history of private banking has been written, but the future will see your interaction with your private banker be nothing like what it has been over the last century.??New technologies will enable highly trained and regulated bankers to systematically go beyond portfolio management and advise clients on crafting the structure of their entire wealth to optimise returns, mitigate risk within an efficient tax and family governance framework.??This will be achieved through bespoke, interactive, computer-enabled visual representation.

As new trends and investable opportunities emerge, bankers will need to keep up with (and hopefully be ahead of) the opportunity set and deliver these to their clients.??Don’t write-off “Crypto 2.0”.??

Over-regulation, in particular in the field of investor protection, will continue to require heavy investments in compliance systems but also burden investors.??It is here to stay and will ultimately ensure a more stable system with fewer grey areas and opportunities for litigation.?

Ultimately, clients should choose a premier institution within their geographic sphere to benefit from the best service offering and regulatory protection.??The focus should however remain on the corporate culture of this PB: it will always trump rules and regulations.??When I joined Pictet, the Senior Partner at the time, Nicolas Pictet, was known for his mantra: “If you work hard to do right by your client, success will always follow”.??As I am moving on, it is all the good I wish to the private banking industry and its clients.

Dominique M. Jooris

Singapore, 21 July 2021???

[1]?https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/high-net-worth-individual-hwni/

[2]?https://www.ft.com/content/15dd3552-3fad-11e7-82b6-896b95f30f58

[3]?Assets under Management

[4]?Andrew MacPherson is Head of Portfolio Construction a Pictet Wealth Management

[5]?https://privetechnologies.com

[6]?https://www.canopy.cloud

[7]?https://www.paxfamilia.com

[8]?www.Netwealth.com

[9]?https://www.lgt.com/en/news/lgt-acquires-wealth-management-business-of-ubs-europe-se-in-austria/#button1,?https://www.finews.asia/finance/24495-lgt-abn-amro-asian-private-banking-private-wealth-asia-prince-max-von-und-zu-liechtenstein

[10]?KPMG white paper: Hong Kong: “A Leading global wealth management hub of the future”, September 2018

[11]?https://www.statista.com/statistics/322063/offshore-wealth-destinations/

[12]?This expression was first attributed to Goldman Sachs’ Gus Levy

[13]?Nagendra Y. N. , LinkedIn post circa 8 July 2021

[14]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-20/wall-street-jpmorgan-exec-says-why-bankers-need-to-work-72-hours-a-week?srnd=premium-asia

[15]?“Il Viendra”, Jacques Attali, 1994

[16]?“The problem […] is that you eventually run out of other people's money”, Margaret Thatcher?

[17]?https://fortune.com/2021/07/20/bitcoin-price-btc-crash-tesla-gains-tsla-stock/

[18]?Anthony Di Lorio, quoted by Bloomberg, 17 July 2021?

[19]?“Gold … has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end” […] “Owners are not inspired by what the asset itself can produce — it will remain lifeless forever — but rather by the belief that others will desire it even more avidly in the future”??— Warren Buffett,?Letter to shareholders, 2011

[20]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp

[21]?Consumer protection agencies should tell them that?this is 2021, and no longer the era of underwater telegraphic cables being disturbed by giant squids to justify money disappearing in limbo for 3 business days.

[22]?Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance