WealthTech Annual 2025

For two days in September, Kongresshaus Zürich filled with the people writing wealth management's operating-model agenda for the year ahead. The fifth edition of WealthTech Annual brought 812 delegates, 67 speakers and 24 sessions through the building, and like every year, the most interesting conversations happened in the lakeside foyer between sessions, not on the main stage.

But the main stage delivered too. Sara Alfaro's opening keynote, five years to the day after Avaloq's last private-bank platform launch, set the tone: the decade ahead is about platform rationalisation, not platform proliferation. Two hours later, a candid CIO panel from three of last year's most-discussed rebuilds quietly rewrote the consolidation narrative everyone walked in with.

The moment we stopped treating agentic AI as a science project and started treating it as an operational decision, our entire procurement timeline compressed. We went from twelve months of discovery to six weeks of pilots. That single shift is what made this year different.

Sarah Chen Head of AI, Atomic Insights

The Day-2 buyer panel, UBS, LGT, Lombard Odier and Pictet on how their procurement processes changed in the past year, was the session sponsors quote most often in their post-event collateral. It was also the session that put the tightest constraint on what most vendors will lead with next year: a clean line into business-need taxonomy, named integrations, and a credible reference customer at the head of the deck.

The closing panel, three CEOs on the firm-shape they're building toward in 2030 , surfaced one bet most attendees seemed to share: the wealth firm of the next decade looks less like a platform and more like an editorial team that happens to operate a balance sheet. That framing alone is worth running through your 2026 planning cycle.