The New Geography Of Wealth

Boston Consulting Group's Global Wealth Report 2026 found that cross-border wealth reached $15.6 trillion in 2025, with Hong Kong narrowly overtaking Switzerland as the world's largest cross-border booking centre for the first time. Singapore bags third place and the UAE comes seventh.

A booking centre is the jurisdiction where a client's wealth is formally held and administered - the location of the bank account, custody arrangement or investment platform where assets are legally booked. Hong Kong, Switzerland and Singapore are popular because they offer the strongest regulatory stability and predictability, custody infrastructure, currency access and wealth management expertise.

The growing trend towards optionality - the deliberate spreading of assets, residence rights, citizenship and personal ties across more than one country - is seeing wealthy families often choose a booking centre separate from where they live or hold residence. A family could hold citizenship in one country, live in another and still choose to bank and invest through Hong Kong or Switzerland because of the benefits outlined above.

Henley & Partners' Private Wealth Migration Report 2026 takes a deep dive into this trend towards constructing multi-jurisdictional frameworks. Their Global Wealth Mobility Framework assesses jurisdictions on a broader range of structural factors that determine their attractiveness to internationally mobile wealth. These include those which make for an attractive booking centre while also including additional factors such as tax treatment, geopolitical stability and quality of life factors including healthcare, education, safety and climate resilience. Each jurisdiction is given a score out of 100.

Both reports point in the same direction: wealth spreading across more jurisdictions than before, whether that's measured by where people are choosing to live, or by where their money is actually held. 

Let's take a look at the jurisdictions leading the pack when it comes to attracting wealth, and some of the up-and-coming destinations that are widening the field.

BCG describes the top three booking centres as two emerging hub networks rather than a single hierarchy: one centred on Hong Kong and Singapore, serving capital from mainland China, India and Southeast Asia, and another anchored by Switzerland, the US and UK, serving wealth from Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

The UAE sits further down the table but continues to post some of the fastest cross-border growth of any hub globally - a reminder that this reordering isn't just about the established centres trading places, but about genuinely new hubs earning a place at the table.

New Zealand's score of 75.8 reflects renewed investor interest following reforms to its Active Investor Plus Visa Program, but the more distinctive part of its appeal is what it offers beyond the visa itself: strong rule of law, genuine geopolitical distance from most global flashpoints, a favourable tax environment (no gift, estate or wealth tax) and a reputation as somewhere to build a long-term family base rather than an operational one. It’s particularly attractive if succession planning is a priority.

Greece's rise to a score of 70.5 is one of the clearer examples in this year's report of how directly one country's policy decisions reshape demand elsewhere. When Spain closed its golden visa and Portugal withdrew its property-linked investment route, Greece picked up much of the resulting demand - though it's worth noting this wasn't simply a case of being in the right place at the right time. 

Greece backed up that timing with genuine incentives of its own, including a flat tax regime for new tax residents and pension recipients relocating from abroad, alongside one of the more accessible golden visa programmes remaining in Europe.

In addition, Mediterranean climate, a lower cost of living than much of Western Europe and full access to the EU and Schengen Area combine to make Greece a genuinely attractive proposition well beyond the investment terms on paper.

Panama's score of 71.5 places it just above Greece in Henley's Strong Wealth Mobility Jurisdictions tier, and its journey there has been a notable one - from a jurisdiction once associated with financial opacity to a genuine regional investment hub, backed by renewed political stability and strategic infrastructure investment. 

Panama’s territorial tax system exempts all foreign-sourced income from tax entirely. Additionally, its Friendly Nations Visa, open to citizens of around fifty countries including the US, UK, Canada and most EU nations, remains one of the more accessible residency routes available anywhere - a property investment or bank deposit of $200,000, or a local job offer, leading to permanent residency and, after five years, citizenship. 

The dollarised economy removes currency risk entirely for dollar-denominated wealth, while Panama's role as a logistics and connectivity hub adds a genuine commercial case alongside the residency one.

Taken together, these six jurisdictions don't share a formula so much as prove a point: there's no single winning strategy for attracting internationally mobile wealth anymore. 

Global wealth is increasingly spread across a wider set of jurisdictions, rather than concentrated in the handful of traditional capitals that dominated for most of the last century - and that competition has genuinely broadened, with several legitimately different paths to success now on offer at once.

A wider field of credible destinations is good news for families with genuine choice, but it also raises the bar for how that choice gets made. With this many attractive options, the question isn't simply which jurisdiction scores highest, but which one's specific strengths actually match a family's own priorities. 

And this is precisely where the trend towards optionality comes back into play: increasingly families aren't just choosing one jurisdiction from this wider field, they're building a life across several of them at once - which means there's more to think through, not less.

A wider map creates more opportunity, but for those looking to relocate or seeking greater international optionality, there's also more complexity to deal with than ever before -including a wide range of factors to consider and more moving parts to keep track of as circumstances, and the jurisdictions themselves, continue to change.

If you'd like help with multi-jurisdictional wealth planning aligned to your circumstances, get in touch to arrange a conversation with one of our advisers.