Life

May 15-22, 2006 issue - Once upon a time, being rich meant being rooted. A wealthy family would build a grand home in the city, have a second one for weekends in the country, then stock them with expensive art, fabrics, jewels and, of course, a staff. They would belong to the best local clubs, frequent restaurants, and support the local symphony and museum. If they were trying to signal something, it was that they had been in this place for centuries. Fast-forward to 2006. The rich are on the move. They still live well, of course, but they do so in many places, across the globe. They go from their house in Hong Kong to the pied-Ð" -terre in New York. They spend a month in Provence one year and then catch the London theater scene on the way back. (By some estimates, 15 percent of the properties in Western Europe are now second homes.)If the old rich were symbolized by stability, the new are marked by movement. Welcome to the jet setÐ'--a quaint, old-fashioned phrase but one that best describes this new world.

Partly this is a simple matter of more money and more ways to invest and spend it. According to the 2005 World Wealth Report produced by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini, there are now 8.3 million millionaires internationally, up 7.3 percent from the previous year, holding an eye-popping $30.8 trillion worth of assets. What's more, the top end of that spectrumÐ'--those worth more than $30 millionÐ'--is growing fastest. The group includes numerous well-known Western business titans, but numbers are rising faster in parts of the developing world. The last few years of soaring equity, real estate and commodity markets have been good to them all: UBS's wealth-management division alone saw an influx of $76 billion in new money last year, up 57 percent from 2004.

Ten or 15 years ago, wealth management was a pretty straightforward business. The private-client division of institutions like UBS, JPMorgan or Citibank would invest in a set of simple optionsÐ'--stocks, bonds and real estate. But consider how UBS, the world's largest private banker, has evolved over the past decade. Its clients, increasingly entrepreneurs and self-made financiers with a web of multinational investments and homes in several countries, want 24/7 global access to every imaginable asset via bespoke trading platforms (highly encrypted for privacy, of course). That means that aside from buying and selling equities and debt for their clients, UBS now also has to be a software and IT