Clients: the next Italian generation and the transfer of wealth

The legacy clientele

The private banking business of Lugano was built on a clientele of Italian families, and despite all the changes since 2009 Italy remains its most important foreign market. Chapter E.II has described how the Italian tax amnesties of 2001 to 2009 and the voluntary disclosure programme of 2015 to 2017 regularized most of the assets that Italian residents held in Switzerland. The voluntary disclosure alone produced more than 129,000 applications, and Switzerland accounted for 69.6 per cent of the assets declared.¹ Many of these assets stayed in Lugano after their regularization, because the clients valued the stability of Switzerland, the quality of service and the possibility of holding assets outside the Italian banking system. Others were repatriated to Italian banks, often to the Italian subsidiaries of the same Swiss groups. The result is a clientele that is tax-compliant, transparent to the Italian authorities through the automatic exchange of information and, on average, old.

The age of the clients follows from the history. The typical Lugano client of the 1970s to the 1990s was an entrepreneur from Lombardy, Piedmont or the Veneto who had built a family company after the war and wanted to keep part of the proceeds outside Italy. That generation is now in its eighties or has died. Its children, often in their fifties and sixties, inherited both the companies and the Swiss accounts. The grandchildren, who will inherit over the next two decades, have grown up in a different world. Many have studied abroad, work in Milan, London or elsewhere, use digital banking as a matter of course and regard the Swiss account of their grandparents as a legacy that needs justification.

The scale of the transfer

The transfer of wealth between generations has become a theme of every wealth management strategy. The UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 estimates that more than USD 83 trillion will change hands worldwide over the next twenty to twenty-five years, of which about USD 9 trillion between spouses and USD 74 trillion between generations.² For Italy the asset manager Vanguard estimated in 2024 that about EUR 3.8 trillion would pass between generations over the next thirty years. The same article cited a survey by Cerulli Associates according to which 87 per cent of heirs considered it unlikely that they would keep their parents' financial adviser after the inheritance.³ The figure comes from market research and should be read as an indication of attitudes, but it identifies the central risk for Lugano. If the heirs leave the advisers of their parents, a bank or asset manager that has served a family for forty years may lose the relationship at the moment of succession.

Italian household wealth is large and concentrated in older age groups. Italian households have one of the highest ratios of net wealth to income in the euro area, and a large part of it consists of real estate and family businesses.⁴ The succession of family businesses is a well-known problem of the Italian economy, and every succession raises questions that a Lugano adviser can answer: the structure of the holding, the distribution of shares among heirs, the treatment of forced heirship under Italian law, the use of trusts and foundations, and the residence of the heirs. Chapter E.V has described these instruments, for which demand will grow with the number of successions.

Notes

1. "Voluntary disclosure: 3,8 miliardi di gettito e oltre 129mila istanze. Il bilancio dell'operazione presentato al MEF", Finanza e Fisco, 9 December 2015, https://www.finanzaefisco.com/voluntary-disclosure-38-miliardi-di-gettito-e-oltre-129mila-istanze-il-bilancio-delloperazione-presentato-al-mef/ (129,565 applications; Switzerland 69.6 per cent of the assets declared, about EUR 41.5 billion of EUR 59.5 billion; estimated revenue about EUR 3.8 billion). ↩
2. UBS, "Global Wealth Report 2025: Wealth growth accelerated in 2024", media release of 18 June 2025, https://www.ubs.com/global/ja/media/display-page-ndp/en-20250618-gwr-2025.html. ↩
3. Fabrizio Zumbo, "Consulenti, come prepararsi al 'grande trasferimento di ricchezza' in Italia", BlueRating, 30 September 2024, https://www.bluerating.com/?p=821698. ↩
4. Banca d'Italia and Istat, La ricchezza dei settori istituzionali in Italia (annual joint publication). ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.