‘The first time ever in my profession’: Senior Citi government on why the ultrawealthy need to diversify away from America

“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, advised Fortune in a current interview. Patterson, who leads a workforce shaped particularly to handle purchasers’ cross-border wants holistically throughout Citi’s enterprise traces and geographies, distinguished this motion from outright expatriation, pushing again on narratives — just like the one surrounding actor George Clooney’s French citizenship — that framed rich Americans as abandoning the nation completely. “I wouldn’t call it completely leaving the U.S., in my opinion,” she mentioned, including that purchasers are “not necessarily expatriating from the U.S. either.”

Instead, she described a pursuit of “optionality”: rich Americans acquiring further residencies or golden visas in Italy, Portugal, Jersey within the Channel Islands, Australia and New Zealand. “They’re just looking for more lifestyle enhancement, optionality,” Patterson mentioned, noting purchasers 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 simply asset allocation — as an rising pillar of portfolio diversification. The report initiatives {that a} cumulative $3.06 trillion will shift into 5 main monetary hubs — Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the UAE and the US — between 2025 and 2029, citing BCG’s Global Wealth Report 2025. (Asia is a serious participant, with Hong Kong and Singapore alone seen capturing greater than half of those flows.)

The report identifies three drivers behind this mobility: enhancing household life-style, pursuing enterprise and portfolio progress, and rising wealth resilience towards coverage or sovereign threat.

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 rich households had been planning to shift portfolios away from the U.S., citing fears of an AI bubble, tariffs, a weakening greenback and risky financial coverage.

This shift has been underway because the pandemic, with inquiries from rich Americans about golden visa and citizenship-by-investment applications surging by greater than 500% over 5 years to 2024, with Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain as prime locations — almost the identical record of nations Patterson nonetheless cites. One migration marketing consultant advised Fortune on the time that rich Americans had been “hedging their bets.”

More just lately, Henley & Partners’ 2026 Wealth Migration Report discovered rich Americans at the moment are among the many most lively individuals globally in buying residency or citizenship overseas. Notably, the agency discovered many are “keeping their wealth at home” whilst they safe a international foothold, a nuance that helps Patterson’s findings as nicely — it’s about optionality, not a full departure.

The development isn’t confined to Citi’s shopper guide. CNBC reported in May 2026 that 60% of household places of work surveyed by UBS deliberate to make strategic modifications to their asset allocation over the following 12 months — roughly double the extent of the prior 5 years, and the very best UBS has recorded — with many trimming U.S. greenback publicity amid fears of an AI bubble, tariffs, a weakening greenback and risky financial coverage, the so-called “de-dollarization trade.” Nearly 30% mentioned that they had minimize or had been contemplating reducing their dollar-denominated holdings. Tellingly, the pullback was concentrated outdoors the U.S.: American household places of work really raised their home-country allocation from 86% to 88%, reinforcing Patterson’s level that that is diversification somewhat than flight — an industry-wide phenomenon somewhat than an artifact of 1 financial institution’s shopper base.

New wealth desires international publicity

Patterson’s observations had been bolstered by a separate dialog with Richard Weintraub, who runs Citi’s household workplace enterprise throughout North America and Latin America, overlaying roughly 2,000 household places of work globally with a median internet value exceeding $2 billion. Weintraub famous that newly created U.S. wealth is more and more requesting worldwide reserving choices as a matter after all. “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.