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 themselves to identify the companies that they admire as the top providers of both competitive and non-competitive services. Participating private banks were sent an online questionnaire by email, 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 on a regional-level basis:
their bank’s latest reported audited annual non-institutional private banking AUM; their annual AUM growth rate; the number of employees in the private banking division – average for latest audited year; the net income from private banking – latest audited annual figures; the year-on-year percentage change in annual net income; the percentage change in net new assets.
and, on a country-level basis:
the latest year-on-year percentage change in the number of private banking clients; the latest year-on-year percentage change in private banking gross revenue; the latest year-on-year percentage change in private banking net income.
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 banks’ competitors. We asked the 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 9 until October 29 2012. We received 1,862 valid Part B votes and also 672 Part A forms representing $9.2 trillion in assets under management (an overall 8% increase on the 1,669 Part B votes and 747 Part A forms received last year).
For more information please contact Kalin Trifonov at ktrifonov@euromoney.com.