AUM portability is the single most important number in any senior private banking career move. Banks use it to price offers. Bankers use it to negotiate. Most people get it wrong.
The question every senior private banker eventually faces is not whether to move, but whether their clients will follow. That question has a name in the industry: AUM portability. It is also the number that determines whether a hiring bank makes an offer, how large that offer is, and how much transition support they are willing to provide.
Most private bankers significantly overestimate their portability. Most banks start from significant scepticism. The gap between those two positions is where most career moves get complicated.
AUM portability is not a fixed number. It is an estimate of the proportion of a banker's current assets under management that are likely to follow them to a new platform within a defined window, typically twelve to eighteen months.
The estimate depends on several variables that are specific to each banker's book, each client relationship, and each market. A banker managing CHF 300M in Geneva does not have CHF 300M in portable AUM. They have some fraction of that, maybe CHF 120M, maybe CHF 240M, and the actual figure depends on things that cannot be read off a portfolio statement.
The relevant variables are: the nature of the relationship (personal versus institutionally owned), the client's banking history (single-banked versus multi-banked), the jurisdiction of the booking (which affects how easy it is for a client to move assets), the existence and scope of non-solicitation agreements, the product complexity of the book (discretionary mandates are harder to move than advisory), and the time elapsed since the last significant market event affecting the client's risk appetite.
The most common error is conflating AUM under management with personally owned relationships. A banker with CHF 300M on their book who inherited 40% of that from a predecessor, and whose largest five clients were originally introduced by the bank rather than by the banker, does not have CHF 300M in portable AUM. They have the fraction that is genuinely theirs, relationships they built, clients who trust them personally, names who would follow them regardless of the bank's brand.
The second common error is ignoring concentration risk. A book where three clients represent 60% of AUM is not a book where you can assume 60% portability on those three relationships. High concentration means high variance. If the three large clients stay, portability is fine. If one of them decides the disruption of a bank move is not worth it, portability drops sharply.
The third error is underweighting legal constraints. Non-solicitation clauses in Swiss employment contracts are enforceable. Garden leave periods are real. The window during which a banker cannot reach out to former clients is not just a technicality, it is a period during which competing bankers at the old institution are actively managing those relationships.
When a senior private banker interviews at a new platform, the business case review is not a formality. Banks have been doing this long enough to have developed systematic approaches to separating credible portability claims from aspirational ones.
The typical documentation request includes: a breakdown of the book by client (anonymised), showing AUM, revenue contribution, booking centre, relationship start date, and product mix; a self-assessment of each significant relationship categorised as personally owned, jointly owned, or institutionally owned; an honest assessment of the non-solicit scope and duration; and a timeline showing when each major client relationship was established.
The most credible business plans are not the ones with the highest portability numbers. They are the ones where the reasoning is internally consistent, the concentrations are acknowledged, and the timeline is realistic. A banker who walks in saying I will bring 85% in six months without evidence of self-originated relationships is not being taken at face value. A banker who says I have twelve personally owned relationships representing CHF 140M, of which I believe eight will follow me in the first year based on specific reasons I can explain for each, that banker has a business case.
The starting point is always the quality and depth of the personal relationship. Private banking is a relationship business. A client who has lunch with their banker three times a year, whose children the banker knows by name, and who has been with that banker across two different institutions already, is mobile. A client who is managed by a team and who has never met the banker outside of a formal review is not.
Beyond relationship quality, the key factors are: how long the client has been with the banker (not the bank), whether the client has a genuine preference for the booking centre or is indifferent, the fee sensitivity of the client, and the client's broader banking situation. A client who books everything at one institution is harder to move than a client who already multi-banks.
Regulatory jurisdiction matters more than most bankers acknowledge. Moving Swiss-booked assets between Swiss banks is operationally straightforward. Moving assets from a Swiss booking centre to a Dubai booking centre requires client consent, additional KYC documentation, and in many cases a re-suitability assessment. The friction cost is real, and some clients will not make that journey.
Executive Partners uses a structured six-dimension scoring model to estimate realistic AUM portability before any bank introduction. The dimensions are: client loyalty (personal relationship strength), wallet share (share of total client wealth currently managed), regulatory jurisdiction (ease of transfer given booking centre), product complexity (advisory versus DPM versus structured), client concentration (risk from top-five client exposure), and legal constraints (non-solicit scope and duration).
Each dimension is scored, weighted, and combined into a single portability estimate with a range, not a point estimate. The range matters. A book might realistically transfer 40% to 65% of AUM depending on market conditions, timing, and client decisions that cannot be fully controlled. A business plan built on 65% and stress-tested at 40% is credible. A business plan built on 65% with no downside scenario is not.
The tool is available at execpartners.ch/en/portability and takes approximately twelve minutes to complete. The output is a portability score, an estimated range of portable AUM, and an identification of which dimensions most constrain the estimate, which is often more useful than the headline number.
Portability estimates drive offer structures in ways that are not always visible to candidates. A bank hiring a banker with a credible case for CHF 150M in portable AUM within twelve months will structure the offer differently from a bank hiring a banker with a similar total book but a less compelling portability case.
The non-producible contribution (NPC), the upfront contribution to offset a clawback obligation at the departing bank, is typically sized as a multiple of current year compensation and is higher for candidates with stronger portability evidence. The variable component of the first-year package is often linked to AUM onboarded at defined milestones, which means the candidate's own portability estimate becomes the baseline against which performance is measured.
Understanding your own portability accurately, before walking into any hiring conversation, is not just a due diligence exercise. It is a negotiation asset.
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[1] FINMA, Circular 2009/1 on guidelines for asset management agreements. [2] Swiss Code of Obligations, Art. 340 et seq.: non-competition and non-solicitation clauses.
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