The relationship between an affluent family and its private banker is often long-standing, built on personal trust and continuity. Yet, as wealth becomes more complex and expectations around transparency increase, the question of the independence of advice becomes central. It is precisely on this point that the multi-family office differs fundamentally from the private bank.
The private bank model
The Swiss private bank offers an extensive range of services: asset custody, discretionary or advisory management, lombard lending, succession planning, access to alternative investments. These services are grouped under one roof, which offers real convenience. However, this integrated model structurally generates conflicts of interest that must be understood.
When your banker recommends a proprietary structured product, an in-house fund or an insurance solution, they do so as an employee of an institution that derives direct remuneration from it. Swiss regulation (in particular the FinSA rules on retrocessions) has progressively regulated these practices, but the bank's commercial logic remains present.
Moreover, the private bank is by definition mono-institutional: it cannot give you a consolidated, independent view of all your assets if you hold assets at other institutions.
The multi-family office model
The family office is structurally independent of the providers it recommends or supervises. It does not market products, does not receive retrocessions, and has no interest in directing your assets towards any particular institution. Its remuneration is transparent — generally a fixed fee or a percentage of supervised assets — and does not depend on allocation decisions.
This independence translates concretely into:
- Freedom to select custodian banks: the family office can recommend distributing your assets across several institutions to optimise security, costs and access to specific expertise.
- Freedom to select managers: if the family wishes to delegate management to one or more independent managers, the family office selects, evaluates and monitors them without conflict of interest.
- Multi-bank consolidation: the reporting produced by the family office aggregates positions from all institutions into a unified view, enabling performance, allocation and risk analysis across the entire portfolio.
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Where private banks do better
It would be inaccurate to present the private bank as an inferior interlocutor. For certain services, it has significant structural advantages: access to primary markets, lending capacity, foreign exchange solutions, derivatives, secure custody. The family office does not replace the bank — it supervises it.
The most robust model is often a layered organisation: the family selects one or more custodian banks, optionally delegates management to specialised independent managers, and mandates a family office to coordinate the whole, produce consolidated reporting and ensure governance.
The question of retrocessions and transparency
Since the FinSA entered into force in 2020, Swiss financial services providers are required to disclose retrocessions and offer to reimburse them to clients if certain conditions are met. This regulatory development has improved transparency, but it has not resolved the fundamental question of structural conflict of interest in an integrated model.
A family office whose business model rests exclusively on fees charged to the client is by construction aligned with the client's interests. It is this alignment — and not a technical superiority — that constitutes the principal differentiating value.
How to choose?
The question is not to choose between private bank and family office, but to understand the role each plays in your wealth arrangement. If you want a consolidated, independent and enduring view of your assets, with an interlocutor who has no product to sell you, the family office is the appropriate tool.
To assess whether a multi-family office arrangement is relevant for your situation, Ridger invites you to a confidential, no-commitment conversation.