Asset Servicing

As real estate returns to favor as an asset class, sourcing investment opportunities is not necessarily the biggest challenge that wealthy families face. The real hurdle is conducting thorough due diligence—but this can be tackled by joining forces with other family offices.

Artificial intelligence has unsettled software stocks for months. Now it is testing European credit markets and exposing fault lines in parts of private credit that were sold to investors as stable and uncorrelated. “If the software issue remains isolated, markets can cope. If it bleeds into the real economy, then all bets are off.”

Utmost, a provider of insurance-based wealth solutions, has appointed Nicoletta Basso as branch manager of its Luxembourg branch. She previously served for more than 6 years at Utmost as tax and legal counsel for Italy, advising high net worth clients and business partners alongside the sales team.

Prime Minister Takaichi’s clear reflation policy is making Japan attractive to investors once more, even though the policy rate, at 0.75 percent, stands at its highest level in thirty years. The panic surrounding the unwinding of the yen carry trade, which caused global turmoil two years ago, now appears to have definitively faded into the background.

The Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) of DWS are making a significant contribution to the growth of the German asset manager. The assets under management of the firm, in which Deutsche Bank holds an 80 percent stake, increased in 2025 by 73 billion euro to the record sum of 1,085 billion euro. Two thirds of the inflow of 51 billion euro was driven by demand for the in-house Xtrackers ETFs.

The S&P500 is virtually unchanged this year, but beneath the surface the US equity market is moving more than it has in years. More than one fifth of all stocks in the index have already risen or fallen by more than 20 percent this year. The gainers are clearly in the majority: about two out of three. Yet you do not see that reflected in the index itself. How is that possible?

Private market fund managers are entering 2026 with record fundraising confidence, and much of that expansion is being engineered out of Luxembourg, according to Carne Group. The Grand Duchy has become the operational nerve centre for European private capital, hosting the majority of Europe’s ELTIFs and an expanding ecosystem of third-party management companies. Yet as assets surge and semi-liquid structures multiply, Carne’s survey finds that institutional investors are sending a firm signal: growth will only be tolerated if governance, valuation discipline and liquidity management meet a significantly higher bar.

The Federal Reserve has little appetite to cut interest rates in the near term. Minutes of the January meeting show policymakers are increasingly concerned that inflation could stay above the 2 percent target for longer than expected. Markets might have to reprice their expectations, economists say.

Wealthy families are no longer anchored to a single country, and neither are their assets. As heirs disperse and capital flows across jurisdictions, succession planning is shifting from domestic estate structuring to cross-border patrimonial engineering, a transition that is quietly reshaping Luxembourg’s role in European wealth management.