Every conversation about our industry starts at the exit. Licence returns. Successions handed to a peer. Relationship managers moving. Platforms absorbing brands. I have contributed to that conversation more than once, and the direction of travel is not in dispute. The new Swiss wealth managers arriving at the other end of the same pipe get far less attention.
But consolidation is a two-sided word. It describes an industry where firms leave and firms arrive, and the arrivals are what makes the churn healthy rather than terminal. So I went looking for the number nobody quotes: how many new Swiss wealth managers does the country actually produce each year?
The answer is that we produce roughly half as many as we did six years ago.
The number: new Swiss wealth managers per year
I took every firm on FINMA’s list of licensed portfolio managers — 1,358 of them — and looked up when each was entered in the commercial register. For the 1,329 where a year could be established, the picture is this:
| Period | New firms per year | What was going on |
|---|---|---|
| 2005–2019 | 55.5 | The long expansion |
| 2020–2024 | 27.2 | Licence required before you may start |
Difference: minus 51 per cent — barely half as many new Swiss wealth managers a year.
Two more figures put that in context. The median founding year of every licensed Swiss wealth manager is 2010. And 84.5 per cent of them were founded in 2000 or later. An industry that sells continuity across generations is, in the middle of its own distribution, fifteen years old.
Why 2018 was the biggest year on record for new Swiss wealth managers
Look at the chart again. 2018 is the tallest bar in the series — 78 new firms, against 45 the year before. That is not a coincidence and it is not the market.
FINIG was adopted in June 2018 and came into force on 1 January 2020. Firms already active before that date could keep operating and had until the end of 2022 to file their application. Firms starting afterwards could not. From 2021, you must join a supervisory organisation and hold the FINMA licence before you take your first client.
So 2018 and 2019 were the last two years in which a Swiss banker could do what Swiss bankers had done for thirty years: leave, incorporate, and start calling clients. The queue formed, and then the door shut.
This is not consolidation
Consolidation implies motion — firms merge, assets move, the survivors get stronger, and new entrants keep the pressure on. What the founding curve shows is different. The exits continue. The entries — the new Swiss wealth managers who used to replace them — have halved. That is not a market reorganising itself; that is a market with a closed front door.
And it changes what the succession problem means. When a sixty-five-year-old owner with CHF 400 million and no successor looks for a buyer, the natural buyer used to be the forty-year-old who had just left a bank and needed assets. That person now needs a licence first, which means capital, an organisation, a compliance function and several months, before they have a single client. Fewer of them exist. So the seller sells to a platform or to a larger peer instead — which is exactly the silent consolidation the industry keeps describing without connecting it to its cause.
What this data cannot tell you
Three limits, and I would rather state them than have them pointed out.
The last years are censored, not empty. 2025 and 2026 show zero foundings. That is an artefact: new Swiss wealth managers cannot appear on a list of licensed firms until they are licensed, and licensing takes months. 2023 and 2024 are probably still filling up too. The 51 per cent decline is therefore an upper bound on the real fall, not a measurement of it. Somewhere below that number sits the truth.
This is a survivor list. Every firm here exists today. Firms founded in 1996 that closed in 2011 are invisible. That biases the early years downwards and makes long-run level comparisons unreliable. What survives the bias is the sharp break between two adjacent years — 58 in 2019, 31 in 2020 — because attrition does not differ meaningfully between neighbours.
The register date is not the wealth-management date. For firms founded after 2000 the two are usually the same, because they were incorporated to be wealth managers. For older firms they can be decades apart. I will come back to that in a separate piece, because it turns out to be the more interesting problem.
What I would watch
If the door to new Swiss wealth managers is genuinely shut, the 2020–2024 cohort should stay small even after the licensing backlog clears. If it is mostly a lag, those years will fill in and the cliff will flatten. Both are testable against the same FINMA list in two or three years, using exactly the method above.
I intend to run it again and publish the result whichever way it goes.
Method. Source: FINMA, “Liste der von der FINMA bewilligten und von einer Aufsichtsorganisation überwachten Vermögensverwalter und Trustees”, retrieved 21 August 2026, 1,504 entries of which 1,358 are portfolio managers. Founding years are commercial-register entry dates via Zefix and the cantonal registers. Years established for 1,329 of 1,358 firms. Counts and chart can be reproduced from those two sources alone.
