Polarization in Progress

by Antonello Di Mascio, Chief Research Officer del Gruppo Excellence

At the end of 2025, Italian wealth served through specialized private banking models exceeded 1,400 billion euros, up 12% compared with the previous year and 37% compared with 2021.
This growth was driven by market performance, clients’ net savings, and some extraordinary perimeter-change transactions.

Elite structures

The figures confirm a structural trend: clients are increasingly asking for specialized service models and a strong human relationship when they have to make investment decisions.

But precisely while the market is expanding, the competitive scenario is being radically transformed with the growth of highly specialized structures such as family offices, the persistence of boutiques that renew themselves within tradition, the growth of some large players that leverage the entrepreneurship of their network enabled for off-premises offering, traditional banking groups that develop specialized models internally, and regional and territorial banks that leverage the human relationship.

For some years now, the market has been differentiating into four distinct poles. On one side, there are boutiques and family offices specialized in specific segments of multigenerational clients who mainly ask for advisory, club deals, private markets, and international succession planning.

On the other side, there are large players — with private banks within them — capable of investing major resources in technology, training and artificial intelligence to efficiently manage a large number of clients.

This dynamic is not new: it is common to other mature sectors such as retail, media, private healthcare, and professional consulting. When regulatory and technological pressure increases, the market tends to reward the extremes. But in wealth management the poles are four, not two.

The third pole, which continues to grow rapidly, is that of network banks, where the entrepreneurship of the network is combined with specialized central support and major investments in technology.

Finally, the fourth pole is that of territorial banks, where the relationship seems to prevail over digitalization, expected performance is stable without excesses, and portfolio volatility appears to be softened through a dialogue of proximity.

These poles coexist, sometimes attract one another through extraordinary transactions, and compete on a daily basis.

The need for uniqueness

Boutiques and family or multifamily offices are growing because they intercept an increasing need for uniqueness and a demand for highly sophisticated day-to-day services combined with a strong search for confidentiality.

At the opposite extreme, large operators enjoy growing and difficult-to-replicate advantages: they can distribute the fixed costs of compliance and technology over enormous assets; they can offer advanced digital advisory platforms, rapid onboarding, advanced reporting, predictive CRM and AI tools for bankers and clients; they can operate in synergy with the world of credit, completing the offer.

At the same time, network banks have internally built sophisticated structures to manage the most complex clients and help entrepreneurs in generational transition, and they have implemented increasingly sophisticated allocation platforms: within themselves, they have in fact developed private banking models.

Territorial banks maintain a strong bond with clients, softening the echoes of the markets and accompanying families throughout their life cycle thanks to efficient advisory platforms and brands that are strongly known and rooted in the territory. They have always leveraged intergenerational relationships.

In modern wealth management, because of the complexity of the external context, scale is not only size but the capacity for continuous investment and renewal in line with socio-demographic evolutions.

Moreover, for everyone there are factors that concern all operators without distinction: technological competition from advanced robo-advisors, digital platforms and low-cost ETF marketplaces; the generational transfer of wealth, since heirs have different expectations; regulation, with the usual European debate on product costs, which however has seen a very significant response from banks through fee-based advisory services.

Large operators enjoy growing and difficult-to-replicate advantages: they can distribute the fixed costs of compliance and technology over enormous assets; they can offer advanced digital advisory platforms, rapid onboarding, advanced reporting, predictive CRM and artificial intelligence tools.

The impact of AI

The arrival of artificial intelligence may play a dual role: further accelerating polarization or reducing it, if boutiques are able to internalize it in order to strengthen their capabilities and if commercial banks — large and territorial — are able to adapt it to their needs.

Large players will use it to industrialize personalized advisory on a large scale. Boutiques will use it to increase productivity and quality while maintaining a light structure.

AI is also a major opportunity for network banks, which will be able to leverage its potential to manage all clients on an ongoing basis.

AI is therefore not an exclusive advantage for anyone: it is a tool that amplifies the strategic choices already made; for this reason, territorial banks too can derive substantial benefit from it.

The coexistence of the four poles is not an opposition, but a natural reallocation of the market shares of wealth, differentiated by types of clients who desire service models based on a human relationship that differs in intensity and frequency.

At the far end are the platforms that place efficiency, speed and competitive costs at the service of a particular autonomous clientele.

Clients choose their interlocutor according to their own priorities and needs, or are often chosen by operators capable of attracting and conquering market shares.

In an increasingly standardized world, human capital once again gains a premium over technology: competition among the poles will make it possible to manage our country’s wealth in an optimal way precisely thanks to their differentiation, capable of providing specific answers to specific client segments.

This article was published in the June 2026 edition of the monthly magazine Private Magazine