Why 128,000 Millionaires Relocated in 2024 — And Where They Landed

A record, and a pattern

128,000 millionaires changed their primary country of residence in 2024 — a record, according to Henley & Partners' Private Wealth Migration Report 2024. That figure alone is a headline. The more useful number is how unevenly it landed.

The UAE was projected to gain roughly 6,700 of them, making it the world's number-one wealth-migration destination for the third year running. Singapore's single-family-office count grew fivefold in four years, from around 400 in 2020 to more than 2,000 by the end of 2024, per the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Switzerland, meanwhile, continued to manage roughly 27% of the world's cross-border private wealth — about CHF 2.4 trillion, per the Swiss Bankers Association's 2025 Banking Barometer — not by attracting a migration wave, but by remaining the jurisdiction wealth was already anchored to before it moved anywhere else.

Three different jobs, one underlying problem

These aren't three examples of the same story. They're three different jobs:

• The UAE is absorbing new arrivals — individuals and families relocating primary residency, often for the first time into a jurisdiction with a federal corporate tax regime that has existed only since June 2023. There is close to no institutional precedent behind it yet.
• Singapore is absorbing structuring demand — family offices being stood up faster than the advisory market historically staffed for them, inside a jurisdiction whose regulatory clarity is a genuine asset, not a workaround.
• Switzerland is absorbing continuity — wealth that was already there, now under a stricter disclosure regime (automatic exchange of information didn't end Swiss wealth structuring; it made precision non-negotiable) than at any point in the jurisdiction's history.

Every one of those jobs is a compliance problem before it's anything else. A newly relocated UAE resident needs a corporate and personal tax position built from scratch, in a regime still being interpreted for the first time by everyone in the market simultaneously. A newly formed Singapore family office needs cross-border structuring that holds up under scrutiny from day one, not month eighteen. A Swiss-anchored mandate needs documentation precise enough to survive automatic information exchange with a client's home tax authority.

Why the advisory market is structurally behind

None of this is a capacity problem that more headcount solves on its own. A firm whose revenue depends on billable advisory hours has a weak incentive to automate the underlying work away — the incentive runs the other direction. And a firm headquartered in the West has a weak instinct for how fast India, the UAE, Singapore, and Switzerland are moving on wealth migration, cross-border structuring, and digital-first regulation — that pace isn't what shaped their systems or their partner incentives in the first place.

That's the gap a platform built from inside these markets — not adapted into them after the fact — is positioned to close.