Asia's Next-Generation Wealthy Want AI for Payments, Humans for Planning and Crypto From Their Private Bank

The heirs to Southeast Asia's private wealth are older than the industry tends to assume, less loyal to their parents' banks, and more interested in crypto than their younger counterparts. Those are the headline findings of WealthSummit's inaugural NextGen Private Banking Clients Study 2026, released in Singapore on September 24 and produced with crypto exchange Independent Reserve.

The survey, conducted in August, covered heirs, entrepreneurs and family business successors in Singapore and Southeast Asia who are taking on responsibility for family or self-made wealth. Gen X made up 61% of respondents, Gen Y 31% and Gen Z 8%. More than seven in ten said their main bank was different from their parents', and 68% said they bank with three or more institutions. On crypto and AI, the study offers a picture that is more specific than the usual generational generalisations, and more useful for the institutions trying to serve these clients.

The AI findings draw a clear line between execution and judgement. Some 77% of respondents said they would rely primarily on AI for everyday banking and payments, 70% for monitoring investments and 56% for researching investment ideas and market developments. The preference reverses for anything consequential. Sixty-three percent would rely mainly on an adviser to understand their overall financial position, 80% prefer human advice on tax and legal matters, and 89% want a human for long-term wealth planning.

That split maps closely onto how the technology is being deployed. This week Robinhood unveiled AI agents that can analyse markets, build strategies and execute trades inside ring-fenced accounts within limits the user sets, with each trade requiring manual approval by default. Products of that kind sit squarely in the monitoring and research categories where WealthSummit's respondents are already comfortable delegating. The survey suggests the wealthy will accept AI as an operator and analyst well before they accept it as a planner, which leaves the relationship manager's role narrower but intact.

Intact does not mean secure. Relationship managers at private banks remain the most cited source of investment advice, at 40%, but independent asset managers are close behind at 37%. Only 10% of respondents rated private banks "very competent" at managing wealth for their generation, with 43% choosing "somewhat competent." Asked what they expect from a private bank, 56% cited investment expertise and performance, 51% transparent and fair fees and 50% digital services and apps. A client base that holds accounts at three or four institutions and rates the incumbents as middling is one that can move assets quickly when a competitor offers something the incumbent does not.

Crypto is one of those things. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they expect their private bank to provide access to crypto, on-chain finance and DeFi, two percentage points behind gold and precious metals at 24%. Private markets remain far more in demand at 70%, followed by club deals at 51% and hedge funds at 33%, so digital assets are a secondary allocation rather than a core one. Still, a store of value with several thousand years of history and an asset class that did not exist before 2009 are now requested at almost the same rate by the region's future wealth holders.

The generational breakdown is the more interesting result. Twenty-three percent of Gen X respondents want crypto access, compared with 16% of Gen Z. That runs against the common framing of crypto as a young investor's trade. It is consistent with the idea that the wealthiest crypto buyers are those who have both the capital and the portfolio size to treat digital assets as a diversifier. The Gen Z figure should be read with caution, since that cohort made up just 8% of a sample whose total size the release does not disclose.

Other research points the same way, though with different magnitudes. UBS's Global Next Generation Report 2026, which surveyed heirs across regions with most respondents in Europe and North America, found only about 11% of those actively managing their wealth held crypto, and that peers rivalled wealth managers as a source of advice.

WealthSummit's own chairman, Claude Baumann, cited UOB research showing 33% of Asian high-net-worth investors aged 30 to 45 ranked digital assets among their top three asset classes, against 17% of those over 60. Taken together, the data suggest demand among wealthy Asian investors is running ahead of their Western peers.

Some banks in the region have already moved to meet it. DBS, which launched crypto options and structured notes for accredited wealth clients in late 2024, now offers spot trading through its DDEx exchange, cold-storage custody and trust structures that can hold digital assets for succession planning, and was named the world's best private bank for digital assets in Euromoney's 2026 awards. According to Euromoney, DBS's high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth clients traded more than $1.4 billion of crypto in the first half of 2025. Many other private banks in Singapore still offer limited or no direct access, which is the gap the survey highlights.

It is also the gap Independent Reserve wants to fill, and readers should weigh the findings with that in mind. The exchange co-produced the study, and its head of trading, Mark Wong, used the release to argue that private banks should keep the client relationship while outsourcing crypto liquidity and execution to "a trusted digital-asset native partner." That is a sales pitch for exactly the white-label model Independent Reserve sells. The underlying data do support a narrower version of the argument. Only 16% of respondents said they would consider crypto banks and platforms to manage their wealth, against 42% for independent asset managers and 33% for online and neo-banks. Wealthy clients want crypto exposure, but most of them want it delivered by the institutions they already use rather than by an exchange.

That preference is the core commercial question for private banks in Singapore. The survey's respondents have already shown they will leave the family bank, spread their assets across several providers and judge each on performance, fees and digital service. For roughly one in five of them, crypto access is part of that assessment. Banks that can offer it through custody, structured products or a partner arrangement retain the relationship, and those that cannot are giving clients one more reason to consolidate elsewhere. The more durable lesson from the AI data may be the same. These clients are happy to let software handle payments and portfolio monitoring, and they will keep paying for human advice only as long as that advice is visibly better than what the software provides.