Private banking 2008: Methodology

For this survey, private banking is defined as banking services targeted at wealthy clients.

The poll had two distinct components this year, Part A and Part B.

For Part A, country heads of private banking/marketing/heads of development were asked to provide on a country-level basis: (i) their bank’s latest reported audited annual non-institutional private banking assets under management in US dollars; (ii) average AUM growth for the last three years, audited annual non-institutional figures, arithmetic mean; (iii) number of employees – average for latest audited year; (iv) net income – latest audited annual figures in US dollars; and (v) year-on-year percentage change in annual net income. For each, we calculated a total for each country. We then calculated each firm’s percentage share of the respective country total. Each firm was then awarded the corresponding share of 30% of their country score in the Best private banking services category. Banks that gave no country-level data received no score for Part A.

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 bank and its competitors. We targeted relationship managers and product structurers 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.

Worldwide and regional results are aggregates of country results.

The poll was conducted from Monday, September 24 until Friday November 2 2007. We received 1,045 valid Part B votes, 87% up on the results published in 2007 (558 valid votes for peers), representing a total $7.6 trillion of AUM. A total of 385 Part A forms were submitted.

We have used information from banks’ own votes, and follow-up contacts with supporting banks and with voters, to make nominations as accurate as possible. In some cases banks may be nominated for services and/or in countries where they do not have operations.