This award is always fiercely contested, and for good reason. Every private bank targets high-net-worth customers. Many of them are tomorrow’s ultra-wealthy customers; a handful will be tomorrow’s billionaires, monied enough to support their own multi-functional family office.
There’s another reason why HNWs are so attractive to wealth managers. As artificial intelligence gets more deeply embedded in financial institutions, it will become more cost- and time-efficient for these institutions to serve the ‘merely’ high-net-worth among us.
Santander Private Banking understands this. The Spanish financial giant’s longstanding investment in its client advisers and in technology place it above its rivals in this category. At the end of September 2024, it served 291,000 clients in 11 countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile. That marks a rise of 13% from the same time a year earlier. It also oversees, region-wide, client assets and liabilities worth €324 billion ($340 billion) – up 17% on an annualised basis.
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