Word: switzerland
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fastest-growing private-banking market in the world, says Scott of BCG. And the world's largest financial institutions?among them HSBC, UBS and Citigroup?are expanding their Singapore presence. Credit Suisse, for example, currently employs roughly 500 private bankers in Singapore, more than any place outside Switzerland?and the bank has plans to hire 100 more this year. Bank Julius Baer, the venerable Swiss private bank, has similarly high expectations. "We're trying to position Singapore as a second leg [after Zurich] to our operation," says Thomas Meier, head of the company's private-banking arm in Asia. Says...
...keep its economy chugging, the Singapore government in the past has implemented farsighted policies to attract electronics manufacturers and biotech start-ups?and the masters program at SMU is part of another official quest: Singapore is determined to become a private-banking haven to rival Switzerland. Several years ago, the city-state's leaders recognized that despite its transparent legal system, low taxes and stable government, Singapore (population 4.2 million) really wasn't big enough to challenge Hong Kong or Tokyo as an Asian center for investment and merchant banking. But tiny Switzerland manages to punch way above its economic...
...That's what its bureaucrats set out to do. In an effort to create an atmosphere that would encourage the world's wealthy to move their assets to Singapore, over the past several years "the government studied Switzerland very closely and created something as good," says Roman Scott, a private-banking expert with Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Among other changes, family-trust laws were amended to make the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next easier?and to offer sanctuary from high estate taxes in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, rules protecting customer confidentiality were strengthened. Divulging...
...feature of the Swiss banking scene was deliberately left off the blueprint: Switzerland's increasingly burdensome taxes. Under pressure from the European Union, which was worried that many of its residents were stashing money in Swiss accounts merely to evade taxes, Switzerland last year began phasing in a 15% withholding tax on personal interest income for E.U. citizens (the rate rises to 35% in 2011). Singapore, meanwhile, was lowering taxes. Nonresidents who park money in Singapore banks pay no taxes if that money is earned outside Singapore, and investment gains earned in the city-state (from stocks, for example...
...That doesn't mean that legions of rich Europeans are suddenly closing their Swiss accounts and moving their money to Singapore. After Switzerland implemented the withholding tax, "very little happened in terms of asset migration," says Sebastian Dovey, managing partner of Scorpio Partnership, a London-based consultancy to the wealth-management industry. "The big gain for Singapore is not to take assets away from Europe," he says. "The big gain is to attract assets from within its own region. And [Singapore] is doing that tremendously." For now, though, it still has a long way to go before it can claim...