Morgan Stanley’s Bobby Singh: Why We Are Exploring an International Wealth Push

Morgan Stanley touts itself as the largest offshore wealth management provider in the U.S., with market share exceeding 22%. But unlike competitors such as JPMorgan Chase and UBS , Morgan Stanley doesn’t have a true international footprint: Its 750 international client advisors, and custody of their clients’ assets, are all in the U.S.

Bobby Singh, who has headed Morgan Stanley’s international wealth management business since 2024, is trying to change that. The impetus, he says, is a “mass migration of wealth” as countries compete to lure wealthy families from around the world. Speaking with Barron’s Advisor, Singh—who once wanted to be a chef—explains why the business’ first foreign outpost would be in Europe if it pursued an expansion. And he argues that Morgan Stanley would have one big advantage as a latecomer to foreign soil.

Bobby Singh, head of international wealth management at Morgan Stanley. Photo: Courtesy of Morgan Stanley

Were you gunning for a career in financial services from an early age? Actually, no. I grew up in India, and after high school I spent a couple of years in Switzerland trying to become a chef. I failed miserably. That’s when I moved to the U.S., got a business degree and joined Ernst & Young. My client was Morgan Stanley. I spent four years sitting in Morgan Stanley’s offices and eventually got hired into the wealth management division. My career has just turned out to be one of those fairy tales.

How is the international wealth business structured? It’s part of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management; we are on the same platform. The uniqueness of the international wealth management business is that all our financial advisors and the custody of assets are U.S.-based. The international component is the clients who reside outside the United States. We’re talking about clients from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, the Middle East, and Asia, opening up investment accounts in the U.S. with Morgan Stanley through financial advisors who are mostly in our New York, South Florida, and California offices.

Our clients are mostly foreign nationals: families, founders, entrepreneurs, family offices, single-family offices, multifamily offices, institutions. We serve the full spectrum of clients across the globe. We’ve got about 750 international client advisors, so we provide them with specific training because Morgan Stanley does not have a wealth management license outside the U.S. So it’s imperative that these individuals understand their obligations when they’re dealing with clients around the world.

You’re now aiming to get licensed outside the U.S. Can you explain the impetus for that? Over the past five or seven years, we have started to notice a globalization of wealth. A lot of countries, in order to lure capital in, are providing tax incentives, specifically to ultrahigh-net-worth people, to come reside in their countries. For folks who are centimillionaires and billionaires, that’s a great incentive to say, “I’m going to spend 181 days in Milan or in Florence or in Rome and reduce my tax obligations significantly.” This is not unique to Italy. Portugal and Dubai are doing the same thing for example. We have this mass migration of wealth taking place.

So if we have a client we’ve been servicing who lives in Mexico who suddenly says, “I’m leaving Mexico and moving to Spain or Italy,” I’m unable to provide them with the same level of service as I was earlier [due to regulation disparities between countries]. So the firm a couple of years ago decided that we need to be as flexible and nimble as possible so we’re able to capture these opportunities globally. We are the largest wealth manager in the United States; we have over $8 trillion of assets under management.

Morgan Stanley believes there’s huge potential in the global offshore wealth market, which it estimates at $15 trillion or more. What specific steps are you taking to capture it? We’re thinking of, first, making sure our Morgan Stanley wealth platform can be adapted to multiple currencies. We would love to see it for Canadian dollars, Japanese yen, euro, the 22 currencies that we typically deal with. Most of these ultrahigh-net-worth clients like the flexibility of having geographic diversification. They’re like: We’ve got $100 million parked with you in the U.S.; that’s great, but because of the geopolitical uncertainty around the world, can you take $25 million of that and open an account for me in Europe? Well, unfortunately, we don’t have the capability to do that. In order to plug that hole, in addition to the multicurrency capabilities, we’re looking at establishing a non-U.S. booking center [a hub where banks legally record and administer client assets] in Europe.

Why is Europe the first target? The firm had a private wealth management business in Europe until we sold it to Credit Suisse in 2013, so there is some level of understanding of how this business works. We sold it for what were the best reasons at that time: 2014 Morgan Stanley was a very different firm than it is right now. Our stock price was less than $25 [compared with $212 recently], for example. So [Europe] makes the most sense for us, and then we potentially could start looking at additional booking centers, even in Dubai or Singapore in the future. But those things will happen once we’ve given the firm enough proof of success for this model.

Where does most of your business come from now? Fifty percent of our assets come from clients in Latin American countries like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile, and it makes complete sense. Because of all the geopolitical uncertainties and policy mismanagement in their countries, high-net-worth clients have always found the U.S. dollar to be the stabilizing factor in their financial planning. The time zones are easy to manage, and so on, so there has been a natural affiliation for clients to come to Morgan Stanley.

Mexico is our biggest market in terms of AUM. We’ve got a lot of Canadian clients who’ve opened up accounts in the U.S. And then it’s Europe, including the United Kingdom, and Asia. Where we don’t have much of a presence at this point is the Gulf region of the Middle East.

Your competitors such as J.P. Morgan, Citi Private, and UBS all have a presence outside the U.S. Are there any advantages to being a bit late to the game? J.P. Morgan and UBS have all these booking centers around the world. They’re multicurrency and all that jazz. That’s fantastic. But if you’re a client who has asked for different jurisdictions to be their booking centers—let’s assume it’s Switzerland and the U.S.—the client is unable to see a comprehensive view of their portfolio. That’s because the legacy systems are completely different. They may be part of an acquisition and have never been integrated. We’re trying to create a world-class multicurrency platform that’s seamless and available in all jurisdictions, so an advisor is able to demonstrate the entire portfolio to a billionaire client who has asked for geographic diversification.

Do you plan to build your foreign presence from the ground up, or is it possible to acquire your way into some of these regions? Acquisition is always tempting, but from our perspective it’s imperative that we provide the clients with the best platform that we can offer, the Morgan Stanley platform. We have an open-architecture platform. We’ve got every fund worth its salt on our platform. So the thinking is: Let’s build our platform. Let’s go outside the U.S. and make the platform available in Europe, as an example. Once we establish this infrastructure, then if we want to acquire something in the future it will be about clients and assets and not about the platform.

What technological advances will help you to better serve international clients? One of the key impediments to having a successful wealth management relationship with a client is the time it takes to onboard a client. We’re proud to have invested not only in technology but also in people and processes to make sure this particular segment, one of many, has as much automation as possible.

I’ll give you an example. Six or seven years ago, if Bobby Singh, living in Mexico City, wanted to open an account with a Morgan Stanley advisor, it would take four to five weeks to get onboarded. If I then wanted to open another account for myself—same name, same source of wealth, same everything—it would have taken another four to five weeks. That process now happens with a click of a button. We call it cloning of accounts.

If I’m a new client in Mexico, for example, and the firm wants documents like my electricity bill to prove my residence in Mexico, unfortunately, my bills are all in Spanish. Earlier, we’d had to find out how to convert that document into an English language document. Now we do that in a heartbeat.

Sounds like you have a lot of work ahead of you. How do you relax and recharge? I’m a runner. I run at least twice on the weekends, and I play a lot of golf during the summertime. During the week, I don’t get much time to relax because by the time I get home, it’s quite late.

There is high pressure because we’re dealing with so many countries and their nuances. If new regulations come in in Barbados, for example, we need to immediately react. It’s that kind of stuff, keeping track of what’s going on with 70-plus countries in a very geopolitically diverse world.

Thanks, Bobby.

Write to advisor.editors@barrons.com

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8