For this survey, private banking is defined as banking services targeted at wealthy clients. The most obvious respondents would be customers, but given their desire for secrecy and the issues of finding a representative sample, this was problematic. We have therefore asked the private banks to identify the companies they admire as the top providers of competitive and non-competitive services. Participating private banks were emailed an online questionnaire, or were able to access the questionnaire directly from the homepage at www.euromoney.com.
The survey had two distinct components this year: Part A (performance figures) and Part B (nominations).
For Part A, heads of private banking/marketing/business development were asked to provide regional level: (i) their bank’s latest reported audited annual non-institutional private banking assets under management (AUM); (ii) annual AUM growth rate; (iii) number of employees in private banking division – average for latest audited year; (iv) net income from private banking – latest audited annual figures; (v) year-on-year percentage change in annual net income; and (vi) percentage change in net new assets. At country level they were asked for: (i) latest year-on-year percentage change in the number of private banking clients; (ii) latest year-on-year percentage change in private banking gross revenue; and (iii) latest year-on-year percentage change in private banking net income.
The best private banking services overall category in each region/country was 70% weighted by the nominations received in Part B and 30% weighted by the data reported in Part A. For each of the variables in Part A, the banks were awarded pro-rata points, based on their share of the total.
In Part B, we were interested in the views of frontline banking staff – individual employees with a perspective on the relative merits and demerits of their banks, and their competitors. We asked voters to identify the country about which they had the most knowledge. They then nominated the peers in that country they thought were best, second and third in each category. We awarded four, three and two points, respectively, to each of those nominations in that category and country. We also awarded a small number of points to the respondent’s own firm for each nomination provided.
The nominations used to produce the global and regional results are aggregates of the country nominations. Regional Part A figures were used for the regional and global results, and country Part A figures were used for the country results.
The survey was conducted from August 5 to October 26, 2011. We received 747 valid Part A forms (74% up on last year), representing $8.7 trillion of assets under management, while 1,669 valid Part B votes were submitted (4% up on last year).
For more information, contact Kalin Trifonov at ktrifonov@euromoney.com.