In my years at a US investment bank, I knew one world very well. The discipline was real. The training was rigorous, the standards were high, and the exposure was genuinely impressive. You learn to think in markets, in structures, in risk. That foundation has stayed with me, and I do not underestimate the value of those years. But the longer I worked there, the more clearly I saw the structural reality behind one specific concept: house products vs open architecture.
The relationship managers I worked closely with were talented, client-focused people. They spoke about open architecture almost as a mantra. The idea was simple and compelling. The best solution for the client should come from the entire market, not just from what sits on the internal shelf. They believed in it, and that belief was sincere. I could see it in how they tried to navigate around the constraints whenever a better external solution existed.
But belief and reality are not always the same thing. At the end of the day, the architecture was not fully open. There were constraints, some visible and some less so. In-house products. Preferred partnerships. Quarterly priorities. The framework shaped the advice, whether anyone intended it to or not. The broader shift back towards in-house products across the industry shows that this is not an isolated observation but a structural trend.
House Products vs Open Architecture: Where the Gap Actually Sits
The gap is rarely about the individual adviser’s intent. It sits one level higher, in the architecture of the firm itself. Even the most client-focused relationship manager operates inside an environment that rewards certain behaviours and gently discourages others. Proprietary platforms typically lean towards their own products for reasons that have less to do with client benefit and more to do with revenue economics, balance sheet alignment and operational efficiency.
This does not make the advisers cynical. It makes them constrained. Many of the best RMs I worked with were acutely aware of this and developed quiet workarounds, recommending external solutions where they could and pushing back internally where it mattered. But the firm’s structural gravity always pulled in one direction. Over time, the gap between what they wanted to deliver and what the architecture allowed them to deliver became apparent to clients as well, often without anyone naming it directly.
That gap stayed with me long after I left. It was not the reason I moved into independent wealth management, but it shaped how I thought about what the work could look like once the constraints were removed. Genuinely open architecture in Swiss independent wealth management is structurally different from the bank-based version, because there is no internal shelf to compete with the external market.
What Genuinely Open Architecture Looks Like in Practice
Today, running an independent wealth management firm in Switzerland, the difference is operational rather than rhetorical. No internal product range. No house view to stay aligned with. No quarterly campaign for a specific structured product. Every solution is chosen purely on merit, across the entire market, for each individual client. The conversation with the client starts from their needs and works outwards, rather than starting from an internal product list and working backwards to justify it.
It turns out the bank-based RMs were right about what great advice should look like. They were just working in a structure that made it difficult to deliver consistently. The shift from one model to the other is not a moral statement. It is an architectural one. Even small structural pressures inside a large institution accumulate over time and shape outcomes more than anyone intended.
The honest question for anyone who has worked inside a bank-based environment is whether they felt that gap, too. Most who reflect openly will recognise it. The harder question is what to do about it, both for advisers considering their own futures and for clients considering where their interests are best represented. For further reflections on these structural dynamics, the Swiss Independent Wealth Management Blog offers ongoing perspectives from inside the industry.
