The twentieth to the twenty-fifth of November 2026 · Convened online
FS Consulting
Summit.
An annual convening of the senior partners advising banks, insurers, asset managers and the buy-side. For four days each year, those who otherwise sit across the table from one another sit on the same side of it — to compare readings of the year, in private, under Chatham House Rule. There are no clients in the room. There is no press, no sponsorship, and no public record. The week's only deliverable is a single synthesised Outlook, drafted by the council.
I — The Convening
The questions on the desk this year no longer sit inside a single practice.
A bank chief executive asks what stablecoin rails will do to the deposit base. A life insurer asks whether its private-credit book is still a duration match in 2027. A wealth platform asks how to price advice when an agent has drafted it. None of these questions resolves within banking, or insurance, or wealth alone — and none of them is answered candidly from a public stage. The Summit exists so that, for one week each year, the partners who carry each of those mandates can speak to one another directly.
II — Form
Four days. A single closed room.
No mainstage, no keynote, no broadcast. The proceedings are constructed around the conversations that ordinarily occur only in private — held once, with care, in the company of fifty peers.
By peers, for peers
Attendance is limited to senior partners, managing directors and chief economists of the firms that shape financial-services advisory. Clients, members of the press and sponsors are not admitted. Each applicant is verified against a firm address.
Chatham House Rule
Material discussed in the room may inform a partner's thinking; it is not attributed and is not reproduced. The intention is plain speech — the position one's investment committee would actually take, not the one the communications team has cleared.
A single deliverable
The week produces one document: a cross-firm reading of the year ahead in financial services, drafted by the council from what was said in the rooms. No firm carries the cover. No individual is quoted without sign-off. Members may cite it for twelve months.
III — The Questions
Nine questions drawn from the briefs landing on partner desks this quarter.
Basel 3.1 endgame; the GENIUS Act and MiCA; private credit at two trillion dollars; agentic AI in the advice chain; enforcement under DORA; the generational wealth transfer; climate underwriting in retreat; core modernisation; and the trajectory of active management. Each question is chaired by a partner from a different firm. Each becomes a chapter of the Outlook.
Working session · 01
"Basel 3.1 endgame: where capital actually lands and what re-prices first"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 02
"GENIUS Act, MiCA and the deposit-vs-stablecoin question banks can no longer defer"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 03
"Private credit at $2.1T: the systemic question regulators are now writing memos about"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 04
"Agentic AI in the front office — who owns the suitability call when the model recommends"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 05
"The $84T wealth transfer: advice models, fee bands and what 'next-gen' actually wants"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 06
"Property & casualty in retreat: CA, FL, the parametric pivot and who underwrites climate"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 07
"Core modernisation, take four: why the mainframe is still there and how to actually move"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 08
"DORA in enforcement: third-party concentration, ICT incidents and the hyperscaler problem"
Chair to be named by the council
Working session · 09
"Active ETFs, fee compression and where asset-management margin goes from here"
Chair to be named by the council
IV — Programme
The week, in outline.
Each day is held in two two-hour sittings — one bridging Asia and EMEA, the other EMEA and the Americas — arranged around the working calendars of senior partners. Nothing is recorded beyond the council's own archive.
V — The Rooms
Nine rooms. A single reading of the book.
Sub-sector breakouts proceed in parallel. The banking partner sits with the insurance partner; payments with private credit; regulatory affairs with the lead on artificial intelligence. The rooms are small enough to permit disagreement and specific enough to leave with positions rather than generalities.
What is exchanged is the substance partners rarely put on a slide: how a counterpart firm is staffing a Basel endgame programme, where another is pricing an agentic-AI build, which mandates have been won and lost and on what terms. Each room admits between eight and twelve voices. One partner chairs. A rapporteur of the council carries the reading directly into the Outlook. Members may move between rooms across the week.
The discipline of moving between rooms is itself the point. The sub-sectors are converging in front of us — payments rails are becoming private-credit distribution; insurance balance sheets are underwriting infrastructure that used to sit with banks; asset managers are buying capabilities that used to sit with custodians; agentic AI is collapsing the cost-to-serve curve across all of them. The partner who sits only in their own room reads one chapter. The partner who crosses between banking, insurance, payments and the buy-side over four days leaves with the map — where a capability built for one sub-sector is the unlock for a mandate in the next, where a client's adjacent problem is a peer firm's open opportunity, and where the most valuable partnerships of the next twelve months are quietly forming across firm and sector lines. The week is engineered for those crossings.
VI — Council & Firms
Fifty partners. One synthesised reading.
The Summit is not sponsored; it is convened. Fifty senior partners and managing directors from the firms that lead financial-services mandates take the chairs, frame the chapters, and remain in correspondence after the week has closed. These are practitioners whose names appear on the work rather than on the circuit.
And the regional FS-advisory practices, capital-markets boutiques and regulatory specialists invited by the council.
The room itself is the asset
Fifty partners whose names sit on the cover pages of the year's defining FS mandates — the Basel endgame programmes, the core-banking re-platformings, the private-credit build-outs, the agentic-AI pilots. The room is the most concentrated reading of the practice anywhere on the calendar, and access to it does not exist on a public stage.
Cross-firm intelligence on live client work
Partners arrive carrying current mandates. Over the week, members hear how a counterpart at another firm is scoping, staffing and pricing the same problem — what is winning, what is being declined, where margin is real and where it is being given away. This is the conversation that ordinarily happens only when partners change firms.
Chairs of standing, not of circuit
Working sessions are chaired by the practitioners actually writing the strategy for the largest institutions in the sector — partners whose authority comes from the work, not from the stage. Each chair frames their session and co-drafts the Outlook chapter that follows. No firm carries the cover; no individual is quoted without sign-off.
Sub-sectors read as one book
The defining moves of the year sit at the seams — payments into private credit, insurance balance sheets into infrastructure, custody into asset servicing, agentic AI across every cost-to-serve curve. Sitting across the nine rooms is the only way to see the seams clearly: where a capability built for one sub-sector unlocks the next mandate, where a client's adjacent problem is a peer firm's open opportunity, and where the partnerships and referrals that compound a practice over the next twelve months are quietly being drawn.
Standing correspondence after the week
The fifty do not disperse. Members remain in active correspondence through the year — a line of sight into how peer firms are reading the cycle as it unfolds, and a citable archive consulted at investment committee, in client work, and in the writing of next year's Outlook.
"For once the partners in the room were not contesting the mandate. The week produced a sharper reading of private credit than six months of internal committee papers."
VII — Admission
Admission is by application and council review.
Fifty chairs are extended by invitation of the council. A small number of further seats are made available, by application, to partners and senior practitioners in financial-services advisory. Each application is verified against a firm address and an active FS mandate. The review is deliberate; the room is constituted with care.
Partner seat
For senior partners and managing directors
Full access to the four working days and the nine sub-sector rooms. Receipt of the synthesised Outlook under embargo, in advance of public release. Twelve-month standing in the Insight Library and in the partners' correspondence following the week.
Contribution from S$1,295 · communicated on review
Practitioner seat
For senior consultants in financial-services practice
Attendance across the four working days, with admission to three sub-sector rooms of one's selection. Receipt of the Outlook on the day of release, and six-month access to the Insight Library.
Contribution from S$495 · communicated on review