Why More Senior RMs Are Asking Me About Going Independent. And What I Tell Them.

Last month I had three separate conversations with senior private bankers who asked me some version of the same question. Not can you help me move to another bank. The question was different. It was: should I just go independent?

One was at a major Swiss private bank navigating its third restructuring in four years. One had spent fifteen years at an institution he genuinely liked but was watching his client base age without any real platform to develop the next generation of relationships. The third had just lost a significant client to an independent wealth manager who, in his words, had no platform, no brand, and no research department and still won the mandate because the client trusted him personally.

Three different situations. Three different frustrations. One recurring question.

The EAM model, external asset managers or independent wealth managers working outside the bank structure, is not a new concept in Switzerland. What is new is how often the question comes up in conversations that used to be purely about lateral moves within the banking system. Something has shifted, and I think it is worth being direct about what that shift is, who it actually makes sense for, and what the real costs are that most bankers do not see until it is too late.

The landscape these bankers are looking at

The Swiss EAM sector is genuinely substantial. FINMA, which has required all portfolio managers and trustees to hold a formal licence since the Financial Institutions Act came into force in January 2020, had approved a total of 1,532 licences as of February 2025, out of 1,864 applications submitted since the requirement was introduced. That gives you a sense of the scale of the regulated independent wealth management sector in Switzerland, over a thousand institutions, ranging from one-person advisory boutiques to multi-manager platforms overseeing several billion francs.

The assets under management across this sector are significant. Industry estimates have consistently placed the collective AuM of Swiss EAMs in the range of CHF 300 to 400 billion. What is clear is that custody banks take this segment seriously as a revenue source. UBP, one of the most active EAM custodian banks in Geneva, had CHF 23 billion of its total CHF 171.7 billion in AuM attributed to EAM clients as of early 2026. Lombard Odier has been servicing EAMs since 1987. Pictet, J.Safra Sarasin, Mirabaud, Bordier, Banque Syz all run dedicated EAM desks. The infrastructure to support an independent manager is well-developed and genuinely competitive.

On the M&A side, PwC reported nine publicly disclosed EAM transactions in the first half of 2025 alone, driven by rising regulatory costs, succession planning, and growing private equity interest in consolidating the sector. The consolidation is real, but so is the new formation: many new EAM entrants in 2025 were spin-offs from larger EAM platforms or bank teams, operating with lean structures and focused client rosters.

What is accelerating the interest among bank-employed RMs is also structural. In some Swiss financial institutions, up to 60% of results now stem from the EAM department rather than traditional private banking. Banks that used to tolerate EAMs as a minor adjacent business are increasingly dependent on them. That dynamic has not been lost on experienced relationship managers who look at their client book and ask themselves which side of that equation they want to be on.

What the three people who called me actually had in common

Before I get into the framework I use to think about this, I want to say something about those three bankers I mentioned at the start, because they illustrate the range of motivations better than any generalisation can.

The first was genuinely portable. He had built his book himself over a decade, mostly UHNW clients from a specific geographic market where he had personal relationships going back years. His clients knew him, not his bank. When we worked through the portability analysis together, looking at the source of each relationship, the existence of credit facilities or structured products that would anchor clients to the current institution, the concentration of decision-making, the number that emerged was solid. Around 65% of his book had genuine portability. That is a meaningful base to build on as an independent.

The second banker was a different story. His book was large on paper, CHF 900 million, but the majority of it had come through referrals from the bank's private equity network, or from clients introduced through the bank's family office platform. The relationships were real and warm. But they were warm to the institution as much as to him personally. His portable number, when we went through it honestly, was closer to 25%. Going independent on 25% of CHF 900 million is a different calculation entirely.

The third was somewhere in between, but the platform frustration was genuine and I took it seriously. He had watched a client move CHF 80 million to an independent who offered nothing his bank did not offer, except one thing: the client felt ownership of the relationship. He felt like a client of the manager, not a client of the bank. That is a competitive dynamic that matters and that is not going away.

The real question is not can I go independent — it is what am I actually selling

Here is the thing I tell every banker who asks me about the EAM route. The question you need to answer before anything else is not about the regulatory requirements, the minimum capital, the custody bank selection, or the fee structure. Those are all solvable problems. The question is: what is the asset you are actually selling?

In a bank, you are selling access to a platform, to a research department, to a credit offering, to a brand that certain clients find reassuring. Your value proposition is partially institutional. The bank lends you credibility, especially with new clients who do not know you personally.

As an EAM, you are selling yourself. Your judgment, your relationships, your independence. The open architecture custody model means you can genuinely offer multi-bank solutions and product neutrality that an employed relationship manager cannot. That is a real advantage for certain clients. But it only works if the client is choosing you, not just following you out of inertia.

This is why portability, and not headline AUM, is the single most critical variable in the decision. A banker with CHF 400 million of genuinely portable, self-originated, personally trusted relationships is a better candidate for the EAM model than a banker with CHF 1.2 billion sitting on a book where 70% of the relationships are institutionally anchored. The first person has an asset. The second person has a reporting line.

What actually going independent costs

I have seen enough of these transitions to be direct about the parts that do not get discussed honestly.

The compliance infrastructure is more expensive and more time-consuming than most bankers expect. Under the FinIA framework, a FINMA portfolio manager licence requires a defined governance structure, qualified personnel at the management level, minimum equity capital of CHF 100,000, and affiliation with one of five FINMA authorised supervisory organisations. The FINMA licensing process itself can take anywhere from several months to well over a year. FINMA's own data shows that in more than 40% of the applications it received in the most recent cohort, it had to request amendments at least five times. This is not a paperwork formality. It is a substantive compliance exercise, and it requires either significant personal bandwidth or the cost of external legal and regulatory counsel to navigate properly.

Then there is the custody bank negotiation. A new EAM with CHF 200 to 300 million does not walk into Pictet or Lombard Odier and receive the same service terms as an established EAM with CHF 2 billion. Minimum asset thresholds for access to certain custody platforms have risen, and banks have become more selective about which new EAMs they onboard. The senior RM who leaves a top-tier private bank and assumes he will have seamless access to the same platforms on day one as an independent is usually in for a recalibration.

Finally, there is the operational reality of running a business. A managing partner of an EAM is not doing pure relationship management. He or she is handling HR, technology decisions, compliance reporting, custody bank relationships, and a hundred other things that the bank absorbed silently in the background. Some bankers discover that they love this. Many discover, somewhat painfully, that they do not.

The profile that works and the one that does not

Based on the transitions I have observed and the ones I have advised on over the years, there is a reasonably clear profile on both sides of this decision.

Going independent tends to work well when three things are present simultaneously: a genuinely portable book with a high proportion of self-originated, personally trusting relationships; an entrepreneurial disposition that finds the operational complexity of running a business energising rather than distracting; and a client base that is sophisticated enough to understand and value what the independent model offers, multi-custody access, product neutrality, genuine advisory independence. UHNW clients with complex cross-border situations and multiple bank relationships are often well-served by an EAM model. Clients who want the reassurance of a large institutional brand, or whose relationship with the bank is partly driven by credit or structured product access, are not good portability candidates regardless of how warm the personal relationship feels.

Going independent tends to fail when the book is more institutional than personal, when the motivation is primarily reactive, frustration with a restructuring, irritation with a management decision, a bad performance review year, rather than genuinely strategic, or when the regulatory and operational complexity is underestimated as an administrative nuisance rather than treated as a serious business investment.

The honest version of this conversation is not should you go independent. It is: are you the kind of asset that generates its own gravity, or are you the kind of asset that performs well within a structure? Both can be excellent. They are not the same thing.

What I told the three bankers

The first one, the one with the genuinely portable book and the long personal relationships, I encouraged to take the EAM route seriously. Not immediately. But to spend the next six months building the business case properly: mapping the portability client by client, selecting a custody bank partner, understanding the regulatory requirements, and being honest about the operational dimension. For him, the model fits.

The second, the one with CHF 900 million on paper and 25% portability, I told him plainly that the EAM route was not the answer to his problem. His problem was that his book was more institutional than personal. The solution to that problem is not to leave the institution. It is to spend the next three years deliberately changing the composition of the book, strengthening personal ties with the clients he genuinely owns, and developing the pipeline that makes him genuinely portable when the time comes. Going independent on 25% of a large book is not freedom. It is a significant step down with a compliance burden on top.

The third, the one who was losing clients to independents, I told something different. His frustration was real and the competitive dynamic he described was real. But the answer for him was not necessarily to become an EAM. It was to understand more clearly what his clients actually valued about him, and whether the bank's platform was genuinely inhibiting that value or whether he was rationalising a structural problem that belonged to him, not to the institution.

That distinction, whether the constraint is external or internal, is the most important question in this conversation. And in my experience, bankers who are honest enough to sit with it for a while usually find the answer they need.

The EAM model in Switzerland is robust, well-regulated, and genuinely competitive with the bank model for the right kind of client and the right kind of advisor. But it is not an escape hatch. It is a business. And like any business, it rewards the people who treat it that way from the start.