The wealth of HNWIs across the world crossed $70 trillion threshold for the first time in 2017, says the World Wealth Report 2018 (WWR) prepared by Capgemini. This has been achieved mainly on account of the improving global economy, says Capgemini, pointing out that this is for the 6th consecutive year that the HNWI wealth has been registering gains. It said HNI wealth grew 10.6%, making 2017 the second-fastest year of HNWI growth since 2011.
The findings of the report covered by Banking Frontiers, say HNWI population continued to grow across global regions, with Asia-Pacific and North America accounting for 74.9% of the total global increase in the HNWI population (1.2 million new HNWIs) and 68.8% of the rise in global HNWI wealth ($4.6 trillion in new HNWI wealth). Europe also realized a strong performance in 2017 with 7.3% of HNWI wealth growth, it says, pointing out that the largest markets comprised the US, Japan, Germany and China, representing 61.2% of the global HNWI population in 2017 and accounted for 62% of all new HNWIs globally.
The report also says equities remained the largest asset class in the first quarter of 2018 at 30.9% of HNWI financial wealth, followed by cash and cash equivalents at 27.2%, and real estate at 16.8% (increase of 2.8 percentage points.) “Younger HNWIs (under aged 40) claim to have achieved much higher investment performance than their older counterparts (37.9% versus 16.9%), possibly because of the need to focus on wealth creation at this early stage of their lives, compared with the higher focus toward wealth preservation of those HNWIs aged 60 and above,” says the report.
