This survey has been designed to provide a qualitative and quantitative review of the best services in private banking, organized by region and areas of service. It also aims to be an informative guide for high-net-worth individuals on the range of service providers that are available.
The structure of the survey questionnaire and the way in which scores were calculated is designed to highlight the firms that provide the most services at the highest level with the greatest success.
For this survey, private banking is defined as banking services targeted to wealthy clients. In order to make fair comparisons of quality services in different disciplines we have ranked service providers alongside each other regardless of whether they would describe themselves as law firms, banks, or consultancies. That is because in each category, irrespective of a firm's self-definition, it is providing a service in that sector to the same set of clients.
Another challenge was to find the most appropriate judges of the quality of these private-banking services. The most obvious respondents would be customers, but given their desire for secrecy and the issues of finding a representative sample this was problematic.
