This article examines the past year and looks forward. We wish all readers a happy holiday. This publication will not now be updated until 4 January, 2016.

2015 has been the year of the robo-advisor, of wealth management M&A action, skyrocketing Swiss francs and tumbling rubles, internationalising Chinese renminbis and gyrating Chinese stocks. Emerging markets have sagged, along with falling oil prices. Most major developed nations' equity indices are also slightly down on the year (as of the time of writing.) Finally, after much waiting, the US Federal Reserve has drawn down the curtains on almost seven years of zero official interest rates, and hiked rates in December.  

And the past 12 months have also seen the lifting – for now – of Western sanctions against Iran over the latter’s alleged nuclear ambitions; geopolitical worries around the Middle East and terrorism have loomed large at times for investors, while the eurozone struggles on with anaemic economic growth. A number of firms, such as Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Canada, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, have restructured their operations, changed management and consolidated booking centres to focus on markets where they see critical mass and scale, such as in Asia. UBS has been aggressively hiring in Asia, and firms such as HSBC see Asia as a key growth region. Royal Bank of Scotland sold the bulk of its non-UK private banking arm to Geneva-headquartered Union Bancaire Privée. 

Several CEOs, such as Peter Sands at Standard Chartered, Brady Dougan at Credit Suisse and Antony Jenkins at Barclays, have left, albeit in different circumstances. There have been wholesale changes to senior management and structures at Deutsche Bank, and more adjustments on the private wealth side are likely there in 2016. 

The start of January will see the beginning of the process known as the Common Reporting Standard, or CRS. This relates to standards for automatically exchanging information between tax authorities of certain countries in a bid to fight global tax evasion. “Early adopter” (some 56 of them) nations will, from 1 January, set in place a system whereby any accounts opened on or after that date will be subject to the automatic exchange regime. Over the next few years, it is expected that as CRS - a sort of global version of the US FATCA legislation – takes hold, it will spell the death, to all intents and purposes, of systems such as Swiss bank secrecy. 

The past year has certainly kept the offshore world in the limelight. HSBC had the kind of publicity it wished it had avoided when a media storm blew up around its Geneva-headquartered Swiss private bank, and its alleged large number of secret accounts for persons from the UK and other places. The bank has, it says, substantially overhauled that operation. The “whistleblower”, Hervé Falciani, who has been convicted by a Swiss court for his leak of client data, was sentenced to jail, but he is in France, so he may never see the inside of a prison cell. On a more positive note, offshore centres continue to draw in business and in Switzerland itself, this publication has been told that banks are trying to move to a post-secrecy business model. It will be interesting to see how Swiss financial services firms, facing headwinds such as negative real interest rates and added compliance costs, make a go of a more open world in 2016. Don’t write the Swiss off.

Another big development in Switzerland started right at the start of 2015, when the Swiss National Bank shocked markets by removing the 1.2 cap against the euro, sending the Swiss currency unit into hyperspace and wiping out hedge funds and bloodying the noses of Swiss firms that book a large chunk of revenues overseas. The country has negative real rates, a plight shared by Denmark. This situation may persist for some time into 2016.

In Singapore, in some ways Asia's "Switzerland", the past year was notable in that the Monetary Authority of Singapore and other bodies have pushed ahead in implementing FAIR [Financial Advisory Industry Review] regulations that are designed to remove some of the more egregious features of a commission-driven sales culture. That jurisdiction also marked the passing in 2015 of former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and had a chance to reflect on how that city-state, once a British colony, has risen to become one of the great financial centres of the world. Property prices have stagnated as Singapore’s leaders moved to head off excessive real estate leverage; that jurisdiction also has to be on its toes in competing with Hong Kong as a financial centre. One trend noted by this publication is how Singapore is pushing to be an incubator for financial technology innovation. When Credit Suisse's private bank chose to roll out its mobile platform in 2015, Singapore was the place it chose to make the launch.

As for Hong Kong, the past year has seen the arrival and development of the equity market link with Shanghai. After seeing equity prices surge during the first half of 2015, mainland equities slid in late summer, prompting Chinese authorities to slap controls on the system and for a while, the air was thick with worry that the Chinese economic miracle could have a nasty ending. By the end of this year, at the time of writing, Chinese equities are in the red although some of the worst losses have been reversed. A significant development a few weeks ago was the renminbi’s acceptance by the International Monetary Fund as a basket currency underpinning the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights System. 

Emerging markets have – with the possible exception to some degree of India – languished. Brazil, which remains highly exposed to trends in commodities, has been hit by falls in prices for agricultural and other products; a stronger dollar and prospect of higher US rates also encouraged investment flows out of emerging markets and back into the dollar. Paradoxically, though, the fact of the Fed’s decision to pull the rate hike trigger in December may offer some relief to such countries. The rise of a large Asian middle class, bringing with it demand for financial services, remains an important focus for wealth managers.

In the UK, the Conservative Party, much to the surprise of the pundits and polling organisations, won the May general election, but perhaps less welcome for wealth managers was a move by finance minister George Osborne to end the notion of permanent non-domicile status for those who had been enjoying that position. He has kept up the pressure on alleged tax evaders and also further squeezed forms of tax avoidance. Tax planning in the UK is an increasingly fraught business. We can expect more of this during 2016, although there may be some pushback if rule changes prove difficult to enforce. A continued issue remains the UK’s relationship with the European Union and the risk of “Brexit” – a referendum on UK membership is slated to be held in 2017 and the months leading up to this event will be marked by uncertainty. It is an issue that may weigh on minds of banks in the months ahead, especially among those wondering whether to move corporate headquarters out of the UK, as has been mentioned in connection with HSBC.

And what of the Americas? The US has a presidential election in November 2016, and the past 12 months have witnessed the extraordinary – which is one way of putting it – rise of Donald Trump as a challenger for the Republican ticket, which could pit him against Hilary Clinton in the race for the White House. It appears unlikely that the US wealth management industry will be happy to see a fight between a populist Republican who appears willing to outrage conventional opinion on the one hand, such as over immigration, and as controversial a figure as Clinton, on the other. Topics such as the solvency of Social Security and Medicaid remain as intractable as ever.

Within wealth management, "the fiduciary debate” rumbles on; the Committee for the Fiduciary Standard once again urged the Department of Labor in September to update regulations in a landmark move that would require any person or firm providing investment advice to retirement investors to do so as a “fiduciary”. The proposal, which sparked heated discussions in the financial services sector and political world, is part of an extremely intense debate over the key differences between the fiduciary obligations of broker-dealers and RIAs. At the crux of the issue is that many clients may consider the investment advice they receive from RIAs and broker-dealers as similar, when there is a crucial legal difference that might not be fully understood. (RIAs must adhere to a fiduciary standard under the Investment Advisors Act 1940 while brokers operate under a “suitability” rule. This means that while recommendations made by brokers must currently be suitable, they don't have to be in an investor's best interest.)

The US has also been involved in – as mentioned above – a number of the wealth management/private banking M&A transactions of 2015, and it is possible that the consolidation process, as firms seek to bolster margins, will continue. Credit Suisse has wound down its private wealth business in the US in a deal with Wells Fargo; Barclays sold its US private banking arm to Stifel Financial. In Canada, meanwhile, Royal Bank of Canada has shed some business units, such as its Swiss private bank, but has bolstered its US wealth franchise with the acquisition of City National. HSBC has sold its Bermuda-based private banking operation to Butterfield. 

In Latin America, HSBC exited the Brazilian market, while the Brazil-headquartered BTG Pactual banking empire was rocked late in the year by the arrest of its chairman and CEO amid a national corruption scandal. More positively, Brazil in October enacted laws giving wealthy investors more freedom to hold foreign assets, a development likely to see more Brazil-sourced investment flows during 2016.

And finally, last year saw continued ferment in the “fintech” world around the notion of automated advice and asset allocation, a process associated with the term “robo advisor”. So far, it seems, private bankers don’t expect to be replaced by tablets or other gadgets, and see the technological developments as augmenting and enhancing what they do, rather than making them obsolete. Time will tell how much of the noise around robo advisors and other fintech innovations translates into hard reality.

And on that note, we wish all our readers a very happy holiday season and prosperous and hopefully more peaceful new year.