Citywire Swiss Wealth

Citywire Swiss Wealth is a two-day retreat held at the Mandarin Oriental Palace in Lucerne, now in its seventh year. Citywire runs it for the Swiss independent wealth management community, and it combines fund manager workshops with an awards ceremony and time away from the office.

Who attends

The event is built for independent wealth managers: the firms that manage money for Swiss and international clients without belonging to a bank. Private bankers and the investment staff of family offices also attend, since they do the same job of choosing funds and setting allocations.

This is an allocator event, not a family office peer group, and the badge on this listing reflects that. Family office investment professionals will find plenty of relevance in the content. Family principals looking for other principals will not, and should look at the screened family office forums instead.

How access works

Citywire manages the delegate list and confirms terms during registration rather than publishing a fee on the event page. As with the rest of its calendar, the commercial side is carried by the fund groups who run the workshops rather than by the delegates, but Citywire does not state the delegate position openly for this retreat, so ask before assuming.

What attendees get

The programme runs sixteen workshops from fund management groups, covering a spread of asset classes and themes. Delegates pick which to attend, which makes the two days closer to a menu than a fixed agenda. Alongside those sit two guest speaker sessions and a panel discussion.

The set piece is the awards ceremony for Switzerland's top fifty independent asset managers, chosen by Citywire. For a Swiss firm, being on that list matters commercially, and the ceremony gives the retreat a draw that a workshop programme alone would not have. It also concentrates the market in one place: if you want to know who is running independent money in Switzerland, this is the shortest route to meeting a large share of them.

For a family office based in Switzerland, the case is different from the one an independent manager would make. You are unlikely to go for the awards. You might well go for the sixteen workshops, the chance to see how the local independent sector is positioning, and two days of conversation with people who face the same regulatory and currency questions you do. Whether that justifies two days out depends on how much of your investment work is done in house.