Private Banking & Wealth Strategy Oversight

Access is the beginning. Strategy is the point.

Opening the account was never the goal. The goal is what your wealth does once inside. The bank has its strategy for your money. We make sure yours wins.

Swiss private banking is an industry, and like every industry it has an inside. The same money can be run two ways. In one house: the custodian bank both holds your assets and manages them — its own desks, its own products, one set of incentives. Or in two houses: the custodian bank holds, and an independent external asset manager (EAM) runs the mandate at that bank. Independent managers often deliver the better outcome — not by magic, but by construction: an EAM lives on your fee, not on product commissions; its architecture is open — the whole market, not one bank’s shelf; and it can move the mandate to another custodian, which keeps the bank’s pricing honest. Often — but not always: sometimes the in-bank mandate is the right answer. That is why we work with both routes constantly, and compare them for your strategy. The one seat the industry does not provide is the seat next to you. That seat is our mandate.

What being inside the industry means for you

We find the right custodian — not the most famous name, but the bank whose policy, pricing and desk actually fit your profile and your plan.
We negotiate the EAM constellation — where an external manager serves the strategy better than a bank’s own desk, we select from the managers we know, negotiate the terms, and keep custodian and manager working as one plan.
We fight the fees — fees, pricing, Lombard rates: in Swiss private banking far more is negotiable than clients are ever told. Knowing the going rates — and being known at the desks — is what turns list prices into real ones.
We speak both languages at the table — with the custodian about pricing, service and appetite; with the EAM about mandate, performance and terms. We know how products actually behave across banks — and we have the standing to ask the questions clients are not supposed to ask.
We review before you sign — every proposal, read the way the bank reads it: costs, incentives, exit terms — and a plain answer to one question: does this serve your strategy, or theirs?

The instruments on the table

A Swiss relationship can do more than hold a portfolio. Lombard lending turns the portfolio into liquidity without selling it — credit at roughly 0.3–3.0% depending on currency and collateral, and because nothing is sold, no capital gain is triggered while the portfolio stays invested. A note on idle cash: Swiss interest income carries a 35% withholding tax. It falls on the income earned, not on your capital — and an experienced banker knows the lawful ways not to lose it, from treaty reclaims for non-residents to how and where the deposit is booked. Which route applies to you is a question for your tax adviser — our job is to make sure it is asked before the money sits idle. And where resilience calls for it, a second jurisdiction: Liechtenstein beside Switzerland.

Possibilities examined case-by-case against your residence, tax position and plan — not recommendations. Tax and legal consequences are confirmed with your own advisers before anything moves; we are a fiduciary, not a tax adviser or asset manager.

And the part nobody mentions: keeping the file alive

Accounts rarely freeze because something was wrong. They freeze because a routine review met an undocumented transaction — and a compliance officer chose the safe refusal. Standing oversight keeps your file current and your transactions documented as they happen, so reviews pass quietly and the accounts simply work.

Who this is for

Private clients who want their strategy — not the bank’s — to run their wealth; family offices and MFOs abroad who need standing Swiss expertise in support of their own; and anyone who has ever signed a bank’s proposal without being sure whose interest it served.