The LatAm book of the future may still be Swiss. The banker may not be.

For decades, the geography of Latin American private banking was relatively easy to understand. The relationship manager sat in Geneva or Zurich, the client sat in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City or Bogotá, and the assets were booked in Switzerland. The distance between banker and client was simply part of the model, accepted as the price of giving Latin American wealth access to a stable offshore jurisdiction, sophisticated custody and the broader Swiss private-banking ecosystem.

That model is not disappearing, but it is starting to split. The more interesting development in LatAm private banking today is not that Switzerland is about to lose its role as a booking centre. It is that where the banker sits, where the client lives, where the assets are booked and which regulatory framework governs the relationship no longer need to be the same place.

Vontobel's expansion of its US-based wealth-management capabilities is a useful example of what that can look like. Rather than a Geneva or Zurich relationship manager covering Latin America from several thousand kilometres away, banks can now position advisers in the US directly. They retain access to Swiss investment expertise, international custody and, depending on the client, Swiss or US booking solutions. The shift is therefore not simply Switzerland to the United States. It is increasingly a Swiss platform combined with US-based coverage for a client whose life is already spread across several jurisdictions.

That distinction matters because the original logic for Switzerland remains strong. For many Latin American families, offshore wealth was never simply about investment performance. It was also about jurisdictional diversification. Political instability, currency risk and concerns around domestic financial systems made holding assets outside the home market part of the family's broader risk-management architecture. Switzerland built an extraordinary position on the back of that demand. Its advantages in custody, lending, international investments and accumulated trust with Latin American families remain difficult to replicate.

What has changed is the client. A growing segment of Latin American HNW and UHNW families now live genuinely transnational lives. Their children study in the United States, they own property in Florida or New York, their companies operate across several jurisdictions and different members of the same family may have different tax residences. For those clients, proximity to their actual life begins to matter almost as much as proximity to the assets themselves. A banker in Miami can be geographically and commercially closer to a Brazilian, Mexican or Colombian family while the client's wealth remains internationally diversified.

That creates a very different operating model from the traditional Swiss LatAm desk, and it has direct consequences for relationship-manager portability. A banker with USD 400 million of LatAm assets under management does not necessarily have a USD 400 million portable book. Portability depends on far more than whether clients like their banker. It can depend on client domicile, US-person status, tax residence, custody preferences, product eligibility, cross-border solicitation rules, contractual restrictions, source-of-wealth requirements, credit needs, booking-centre acceptance and, ultimately, whether the client is prepared to move at all.

Moving from one Swiss platform to another is one exercise. Moving from a Swiss-based relationship structure into a US-regulated advisory environment can be something quite different. The adviser may have to operate under a different registration and supervisory framework, the client may need a different custody structure, certain products may no longer be available in the same form and compliance may reassess the relationship under a completely different set of criteria. Some clients will transfer easily. Others will not. That is why headline AUM is becoming a weaker signal of career optionality unless it comes with a serious read on how the book behaves under a different jurisdiction and platform.

This is also where the talent question becomes more important than the strategic one. There are many experienced LatAm private bankers. There are far fewer who combine deep and genuinely portable client relationships with experience across international booking structures and the regulatory fluency required to operate credibly inside a US-based advisory model. In searches involving US-based LatAm coverage, the challenge is often not finding someone who understands Brazil, Mexico or the Andean markets. It is finding someone who understands those clients and can also function effectively inside the regulatory and commercial architecture of the platform hiring them.

That candidate pool is materially narrower than the traditional Geneva- or Zurich-based LatAm market, and banks considering a build should not underestimate what that means. Opening an office is relatively straightforward. Hiring an entire credible team is not. A bank can decide relatively quickly that Miami should become an important LatAm coverage centre. Building the human capital underneath that decision can take considerably longer.

Latin America is also not one private-banking market. Mexico has obvious structural links to the United States. Many Brazilian UHNW families already have deep connections to Miami and Florida. Other pools of wealth may continue to value Switzerland precisely because it remains geographically and institutionally distant from the client's home market. The evolution will therefore not be uniform, and it does not need to be. The likely outcome is not one model replacing another, but several models coexisting.

A client may eventually have a banker in Miami, custody in Switzerland, property in Florida, operating businesses in Latin America and family members spread across three different jurisdictions. Private banking will increasingly have to reflect that reality. The old assumption that coverage, booking, custody and regulation should all sit neatly in the same place is becoming less useful as the clients themselves become more international.

For relationship managers, this creates a new career question. Historically, a LatAm banker could evaluate their market value largely through the size, quality and portability of their book. Increasingly, they also need to understand the geographic portability of their own career. Can the relationships they manage today be served from another jurisdiction? Can those clients fit another regulatory structure? Could the banker credibly operate from Miami rather than Geneva? Would the economics of the book still work if the booking centre changed? And how much of the apparent AUM would actually survive the transition?

These questions will become more important as banks continue to reconsider where LatAm coverage should physically sit. Switzerland is not disappearing from the equation and may remain central to the custody and investment proposition for a large part of the market. What is becoming harder to assume is that the relationship manager must also sit there.

The LatAm private-banking model of the future may therefore be less about choosing between Miami and Geneva than about connecting them. The banker may sit closer to the client, the assets may remain internationally booked and the regulatory structure may sit somewhere else again. The banks that manage those moving parts well will have an advantage, but so will the relationship managers who understand that their real value is no longer defined only by the size of the book they manage today.

For a LatAm banker considering a move, the more useful question is becoming less "How large is my book?" and more "How much of it is genuinely portable into the platform and jurisdiction I want to move to?"

That is the question the EP Portability Score is designed to test before a banker enters a process.