The Swiss wealth management sector presents very traditional ways of handling its daily business. Although this traditionality brings many good aspects for the industry, it can also be a barrier for the adoption of changes and disruptive trends. For this reason, knowing where to focus their innovative efforts became crucial to the financial institutions, and a deep understanding of the clients and the new trends on this sector appeared to be fundamental. Therefore, this work has focused on finding how the financial institutions can better react to trends such as digitalization, price sensitivity and market transparency, offering the best services to each different clients’ needs.

In terms of methodology, two different research parts were defined. The first one based its data gathering on information provided by a partner private bank, which the name cannot be disclosed. In this phase, a focus group was assembled, and four co-workers dedicated many hours in finding out which were the main existing clients’ segments and how was the fee application process to those different segments. The second one focused on conducting interviews with market specialists, aiming to map any other trends in the Swiss wealth management sector, as well as to confirm the previously gathered information during the focus group stage.

The main results of this research can also be divided into two categories. The first findings were that having a clear client segmentation is important not only to organisation matters, but something that is fundamental in order to be able to adequate the best sales speech to each different client need. Having a deeper segmentation of customers can bring long-lasting results to the analysed companies in this market. The second findings relate to the main trends that were mapped on the Swiss wealth management sector. Topics such as digitalisation, the application of fees, transparency, demand for new investments and many others were deeply discussed during these interviews. As a result, a clearer idea of where this sector is heading towards was formulated.