The editor looks back at the past two months, which have been an eventful start to 2024, and gives a few pointers to what is coming down the track.

It is mid-March already (not a good time for the late Julius Caesar, as fans of Shakespeare might recall), and this time last year, we were covering the various shotgun weddings of Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse, and First Republic.

So far this year the editorial team has spent considerable time interviewing wealth and asset managers to find out how they are reframing clients’ expectations after two years of rising interest rates. We continued to track investment thinking on Japan, which has won its way back into investors’ favours. Emerging markets have been beaten up over the past decade. Several managers are now telling us they think the market is due for better times. We’ll see.

The macroeconomic and geopolitical background cannot be ignored: Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, the Red Sea, worries about what China might do regarding Taiwan, and so forth. This is a US election year, involving the likely battle by an ageing Joe Biden to retain the White House against an ageing – if still seemingly vigorous and combative, Donald Trump. The UK faces a general election, and the polling figures look grim for the ruling Conservatives. There are also elections in several other nations. 

I am typing these words from Monaco, where I attended a conference on how to structure and protect legitimate privacy.The fact that it was so well attended reflects the potency of the subject. Battles over people's ability to gain unfettered access to public registers of beneficial ownership, for example, remain heated. There are signs of a pushback as people realise, perhaps belatedly, that privacy is important and not just something that “the rich” need to worry about. Next, I am off to Luxembourg to attend a funds conference, and take the temperature in another important financial hub for Europe. A week ago, with colleagues for our Swiss EAM awards programme, I had a chance to meet bankers and EAMs in Zurich. Getting out on the road is hard but enjoyable work, necessary for understanding what concerns industry players. Topics that come up include the constant changes in so-called compliance "grey lists," the ease of doing business – or the opposite – and how to balance compliance with legitimate profitability. Here in Monaco, there are concerns in the luxury yachting sector, for instance, that local banks are making it very hard for yacht businesses to open commercial bank accounts, suggesting that Monaco is determined to avoid the slightest issues as a Moneyval assessment is carried out by the end of this month. (It is a permanent monitoring body of the Council of Europe with 35 member states and jurisdictions.)

We are looking a lot at technology at the moment and, of course, AI seems to be a dominant topic. Deciding how to get the best use out of artificial intelligence, while not overlooking the problems, seems to be order of the day. The ways that firms use data to handle compliance, fund selection, mass-customisation and other tasks remain important editorial areas. I’ve written quite a bit lately about the work undertaken to track the vast funds' universe, or manage KYC tasks – when I spoke to Dow Jones, for example, or Moody’s Analytics. Technology is an inescapable part of our business.

My deputy editor, Amanda Cheesley, continues to produce a stream of important investment management profiles delving into what managers think about topics such as agriculture, for example. I had a fascinating chat with TOBAM, a fund management house, about its approach to diversification and what it calls “autocracy risk”. It is plain that there is a lot of high-quality thinking on how to manage money more intelligently. We have also looked at how rising interest rates have galvanised interest in the world of money market funds, for example.

Over in the US, our correspondent, Charles Paikert, has written about high-profile changes of personnel in certain businesses, attended a major fintech conference in Las Vegas to find out what managers really want, and spent time in a classroom to discover what wealth advisors are learning and how to improve the world of talent management. This is the “boots-on-the-ground” coverage we are keen to deliver. 

In addition to all this coverage, we continue to produce a steady stream of guest articles from experts in law, technology, business development and strategy, and I think this showcases how our publications drive thought leadership. And I also want to point out a few additions to our editorial board membership, highlighting the rich vein of expertise we are able to draw on.

In coming weeks we will continue to look at topics such as the shifting fortunes of international financial centres, the external asset manager space in Asia, Switzerland, and other regions, and look at what cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology continues to offer. (Here is our forward features calendar.) As ever, if you want to engage with us editorially, please email tom.burroughes@wealthbriefing.com and amanda.cheesley@clearviewpublishing.com  Thanks again for your support and engagement with our publications.