There is a version of Africa’s wealth story that is rarely shared — a millionaire population expected to grow 65% over the next decade, a sub-Saharan economy forecast to expand 4.3% by 2026, and private capital fundraising that more than doubled to $4bn in 2024 while global fundraising contracted 19%. These numbers are real and increasingly hard to argue with. But through the private banking relationships Barclays has built on this continent over more than a century, we have learnt that a quieter story runs alongside the macro one. A story about grandparents in the Western Cape, children moving between Joburg, London and Dubai, and the delicate, often unspoken question of how this money will transcend generations.
That question, more than any yield curve, is what now occupies us most as advisers to Africa’s wealthiest families.
At Barclays, we organise our private banking philosophy around what we call the three Ls: liquidity, lifestyle, and legacy. Liquidity covers the cash and short-term assets a family needs for daily life. Lifestyle funds the ambitions and passions that make wealth feel worthwhile in the present tense. Legacy is the harder one — the transition of capital, values and control to the next generation, or to causes a family wants to outlive.
Separating wealth into these three time horizons sounds like a modest bit of financial architecture. In practice, we find it does something more important: it stops a family from treating their money as a single undifferentiated pool, and in doing so, it creates space for the conversations families tend to avoid. Succession. Governance. Who gets a say, and when? What happens when the person who built the wealth is no longer managing it?
Layered on to this structural discipline is something we apply less commonly associated with traditional private banking: behavioural finance. We work closely with our clients to understand their financial needs and build portfolios designed specifically to protect long-term returns from fear-driven or impulsive decisions. It is, in effect, an acknowledgement that money management is not a purely rational exercise. Wealth is inherited alongside temperament, guilt, ambition, and grief, and we believe any adviser who ignores that psychology is managing only half the client.
This matters more in Africa today than it might have a decade ago, because the shape of African wealth itself has changed. The average ultra-high-net-worth South African family we serve today is no longer confined to a single city, or even a single country. It is now common for one generation to remain rooted in the Western Cape while their children build lives and separate tax residencies, investment horizons, and relationships with the family’s capital. Those children may eventually have families of their own, each with a different appetite for risk and a different relationship to a fortune they did not personally build.
Managing that kind of dispersion requires more than a local branch and a single relationship manager. It requires a globally co-ordinated adviser with senior bankers embedded in each relevant jurisdiction, working as one team rather than a patchwork of regional offices — a partner capable of holding the whole picture across borders, generations, and asset classes without losing the thread. It is precisely this complexity that has driven the rapid growth of family offices across the continent, from lean administrative set-ups to sophisticated multi-asset platforms. Whatever the scale, we find the underlying need is identical — a partner who understands not just the balance sheet but also the family behind it.
None of this is happening in a vacuum of goodwill. The macro case for Africa is doing real work to make these harder, human conversations possible. South Africa’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force grey list, its first S&P credit upgrade in 20 years and a G20 presidency that has shifted global sentiment have lowered the cost of international engagement. The investors we work with in moving real capital are doing granular, country-by-country, sector-specific, opportunity-specific work to find where perceived risk has outrun actual risk and allocating accordingly.
That granularity, treating each market and each family on its own terms, is really the same instinct behind our framework and our behavioural profiling. Africa’s investment case no longer needs to be put forward, but the wealth being created here still needs the same thing every fortune eventually needs, wherever it is made: an adviser willing to ask not just how much a family has, but who it is for and what it is meant to become.
That, ultimately, is the harder and more durable business we have built our name on over the past century, and the one we intend to keep practising as this wealth grows for many decades into the future.
- Amol Prabhu is the Barclays South Africa CEO and Head of Private Banking for Africa.
From the August issue of Wanted, 2026.
