‘The first time ever in my career’: Senior Citi executive on why the ultrawealthy want to diversify away from America
· Fortune
Wealthy American families are increasingly seeking to book assets outside the United States — a shift so pronounced that one of Citi’s top wealth executives says she’s never seen anything like it in her career.
“The first time ever in my career, that I hear U.S. clients wanted to book their assets outside of the U.S.,” Darlene Patterson, Global Head of Client Solutions at Citi Wealth, told Fortune in a recent interview. Patterson, who leads a team formed specifically to address clients’ cross-border needs holistically across Citi’s business lines and geographies, distinguished this movement from outright expatriation, pushing back on narratives — like the one surrounding actor George Clooney’s French citizenship — that framed wealthy Americans as abandoning the country entirely. “I wouldn’t call it completely leaving the U.S., in my opinion,” she said, adding that clients are “not necessarily expatriating from the U.S. either.”
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Instead, she described a pursuit of “optionality”: wealthy Americans obtaining additional residencies or golden visas in Italy, Portugal, Jersey in the Channel Islands, Australia and New Zealand. “They’re just looking for more lifestyle enhancement, optionality,” Patterson said, noting clients are “somewhat concerned about policy risk in this country.” That’s a key driver that can’t be underestimated, she said: the desire for a “stable, consistent political environment.”
Patterson’s perspective is informed by her own cross-border life. Born and raised in Beijing, she spent the early part of her private banking career in Hong Kong before eventually settling in the U.S. and joining Citi roughly five years ago. She has watched Hong Kong itself transform from a regional hub into a genuinely global one, telling Fortune that the city almost competes for capital with Singapore in “a little bit of a regional local rivalry” that increasingly arrives not just from mainland China and Canada — a legacy of the 1997 handover-era exodus — but from Latin America and the Middle East as well. That vantage point, she suggested, is part of why the current American shift feels so novel to her: Citi also maintains an internal “corridor monitor” that tracks live client data on where money is moving, giving her team real-time visibility into wealth flows beyond published industry research.
Patterson isn’t alone in her field in describing this as unprecedented. Nuri Katz of Apex Capital Partners, an immigration consultant who has spent decades relocating the world’s ultra-rich — including helping wealthy Chinese families move to Canada in an earlier era — told Fortune several weeks ago that Americans are his highest-growing market. In an echo of Patterson, he said, “I’ve never seen that before.”
A $3 trillion global reshuffling
Patterson’s comments accompanied Citi Wealth’s recent Wealth Beyond Borders report, which frames geographic location — not just asset allocation — as an emerging pillar of portfolio diversification. The report projects that a cumulative $3.06 trillion will shift into five leading financial hubs — Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE and the US — between 2025 and 2029, citing BCG’s Global Wealth Report 2025. (Asia is a major player, with Hong Kong and Singapore alone seen capturing more than half of these flows.)
The report identifies three drivers behind this mobility: enhancing family lifestyle, pursuing business and portfolio growth, and increasing wealth resilience against policy or sovereign risk.
That resilience motive echoes directly in Patterson’s remarks about American clients’ policy concerns, and the report explicitly warns that “tax regimes may shift suddenly in adverse ways” and that “in an extreme scenario, full or partial state confiscation may be a factor” in weaker rule-of-law environments — underscoring why predictable, property-rights-respecting jurisdictions have grown more attractive even to Americans. Separately, the UBS Global Family Office report found only a few months ago that wealthy families were planning to shift portfolios away from the U.S., citing fears of an AI bubble, tariffs, a weakening dollar and volatile economic policy.
This shift has been underway since the pandemic, with inquiries from wealthy Americans about golden visa and citizenship-by-investment programs surging by more than 500% over five years to 2024, with Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain as top destinations — nearly the same list of countries Patterson still cites. One migration consultant told Fortune at the time that wealthy Americans were “hedging their bets.”
More recently, Henley & Partners’ 2026 Wealth Migration Report found wealthy Americans are now among the most active people globally in acquiring residency or citizenship abroad. Notably, the firm found many are “keeping their wealth at home” even as they secure a foreign foothold, a nuance that supports Patterson’s findings as well — it’s about optionality, not a full departure.
The trend isn’t confined to Citi’s client book. CNBC reported in May 2026 that 60% of family offices surveyed by UBS planned to make strategic changes to their asset allocation over the next year — roughly double the level of the prior five years, and the highest UBS has recorded — with many trimming U.S. dollar exposure amid fears of an AI bubble, tariffs, a weakening dollar and volatile economic policy, the so-called “de-dollarization trade.” Nearly 30% said they had cut or were considering cutting their dollar-denominated holdings. Tellingly, the pullback was concentrated outside the U.S.: American family offices actually raised their home-country allocation from 86% to 88%, reinforcing Patterson’s point that this is diversification rather than flight — an industry-wide phenomenon rather than an artifact of one bank’s client base.
New wealth wants global exposure
Patterson’s observations were reinforced by a separate conversation with Richard Weintraub, who runs Citi’s family office business across North America and Latin America, covering roughly 2,000 family offices globally with an average net worth exceeding $2 billion. Weintraub noted that newly created U.S. wealth is increasingly requesting international booking options as a matter of course. “What we’re seeing in general is the ability for these very wealthy individuals to invest beyond their borders. To use the large institutions like ours, frankly, to help them find opportunities in other regions, developed or emerging.”
As Patterson described it, “these new billionaires… are all asking, ‘Hey, Citi, you are global. Can I have my assets booked in Switzerland, for example? Can I open accounts in Singapore? These are the new generation of questions that we’re seeing.”
Weintraub also described a broader family-office trend toward illiquidity and diversification beyond domestic borders: Citi’s annual survey of 346 family offices found that 70% now participate in direct private investments, with 40% saying they increased that activity over the past year.
Intentional, not casual
Patterson emphasized that this wealth mobility is deliberate rather than incidental. “What we’re seeing among the client base is very intentional,” she said, contrasting it with older “offshore trust, set it, forget about it” approaches she said have “really been very much left in the old days.” The Citi report similarly stresses that strategic asset location is “not merely a defensive measure” but “a proactive strategy to enhance wealth resilience,” requiring ongoing coordination across jurisdictions rather than a one-time move.
Still, both executives affirmed that America’s fundamental appeal endures. Patterson said geopolitically sensitive regions continue shifting capital into the U.S. “because of our rule of law… and our established and very vibrant capital markets,” pointing to renewed interest from Middle Eastern families following the Iran conflict. The Citi report backs this up: the US holds roughly a third of global liquid investable wealth and is home to 37% of the world’s millionaires.
. The dynamic, in other words, isn’t American capital fleeing — it’s the ultrawealthy, at home and abroad, refusing to keep all their eggs in one jurisdictional basket.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com