Living Beyond Borders: Investment Migration and Crypto - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

good morning everyone as mentioned I'm the I'm an executive committee member and effectively Global head of sales at Henley and partners uh Henley and partners is not a crypto company we're not directly involved in blockchain or web3 or anything like this but we do advise successful founders of these companies as well as crypto investors around the world with gaining either residence by investment or citizenship by investment in a number of countries globally so we've got now 40 offices around the world um we do two things so we we work with wealthy individuals who are looking to acquire additional passports or second or third passports through government regulated investment migration programs we also advise governments themselves on how to design and Implement what's known as an investment migration programs we've raised over 12 12 billion dollars over the last three decades and as I said you know we've got quite a significant Global footprint we serve clients with over a hundred different nationalities around the world so this is not just for those that are in Emerging Markets our biggest market now is actually the us so we have more American clients than we do Chinese or Filipino Indian Nigerian or South African like myself so we're talking about two things we're talking about residents and citizenship and I guess the obvious question is why would someone consider these things so if we look at residence residence is your gives you the ability to reside in a specific country it gives you the ability to work and your children to go to school in that country and of course where you look at citizenship this is your passport and most crucially for a lot of our clients especially in this space is your passport allows you your international travel so I'm a South African citizen my passport is not a very good travel Document I need a visa pretty much everywhere I want to travel but if I'm a successful entrepreneur and I want to grow my business globally I'm looking for greater Global mobility and so I might consider getting a second passport from certain jurisdictions that are much better travel documents another thing we do is we we track the movement of wealth around the world um so you can see on this slide they're consistently over the last decade millionaires are becoming more and more mobile um we obviously had the blip during the covert years we forecast this year that number to get up to almost 125 000 Millionaires and here this is an actual physical relocation so this is individuals with a high net worth of at least a million dollars that's net investable assets that physically relocate to another country for more than six months a year and if we look at the countries that see the greatest net inflows and net outflows of millionaires I guess it's no surprise on the left hand side you see a lot of countries more Emerging Markets more wealth creation happening and as people become wealthier they also become more mobile I'll get into some of the reasons why people move and then on the on the right hand side you see those countries that are seeing a net inflow of those millionaires so again no surprise countries like Singapore and the UAE where I'm based seeing a net inflow of millionaires and then just last week we released our crypto wealth report where we actually tracked the number of crypto based and Bitcoin based millionaires who's whose net worth is based purely on their crypto Holdings um so interesting numbers there and you can see the total number excuse me the total number of users this is the inaugural report that we release released last week I've got a QR code at the end of my deck if you want to get access to the report and of course these are individuals now that we see a significant increase in inquiries looking for citizenship and residents by investment around the world um here I've just sort of mapped out as I said earlier looking at different citizenship and residents by investment is not just for those in politically or economic uncertainty countries but actually we see a lot of interest now from developed markets so if you take the UK as an example since brics it's a lot of wealthy Brits no longer have the the freedom of settlement in Europe so so there we see a lot of interest in Europe of course there's this conflict in you between Ukraine and Russia and there we see a lot of Europeans also coming to us for their plan B you know they're looking for either residence or citizenship outside of Europe as a hedge against such volatility in terms of residence so I think quite obvious why someone would look for an alternative residence and when I speak here we don't do skilled visas we don't do sort of expat relocating this is just for high net worth individuals who have the financial capacity to invest into a country and in return for that investment they get the right they get either a resident permit or sometimes it's called a golden Visa can be permanent residents and so a lot of reasons for that and tax of course can come into it I if I in if I'm based in a high-tech jurisdiction and I can physically acquire residence in another jurisdiction that's more tax friendly I can make use of that a lot of our families that we advise also look at this from a health care access to better education and other things and then when we talk about citizenship the biggest driver here is really as I mentioned earlier the ability to acquire a better travel Document and is a number of countries in the world again where you can invest into the country you can become a citizen without having to physically move there without having to learn a new language part of our crypto wealth report was to develop this crypto adoption index where we looked at a number of parameters such as crypto public adoption other economic factors and of course importantly taxation because around the world many many countries are now becoming more aggressive on their fiscal and Taxation policies particularly towards crypto so what we did with this is we looked at all of the countries around the world that offer investment migration and then across those six parameters we we developed a ranking system to identify those that are more attractive for crypto investors and so again you can see Singapore at the top of the list there I won't go into the details of all the programs that we that we offer um because that's effectively a snapshot of all the different programs that are available so this is a mix of both residents and citizenship by investment and these these are the countries that we assist our clients with there is there's about a hundred countries globally that have some form of of Regulation or legislation in place that does allow for investment migration but in in reality there's only about 30 or 40 that have an attractive successful program that's available so if you look in in the North in North America Canada has a very interesting startup Visa that's available for anywhere between 150 and 250 000 Canadian dollars and that gives you permanent residence in Canada in the U.S you have the eb-5 program which is a 800 000 investment that goes into a regional center that Regional Center effectively builds a project which creates 10 jobs and on that basis you get a green card to the US um most of the sort of what we refer to as the tier one countries like Canada the US UK Australia they have residents by investment where you can invest to get residents that does actually give you a pathway to citizenship but you've really got to earn it you've got to physically go and move to that country usually learn a language pass the citizenship test and eventually you can naturalize as a citizen but that's a lot of work so so that most of our clients are not looking to physically relocate so our clients are mobile you know High net worth individuals but that typically want to stay in the country where their businesses or where they're made their life and so that's why the golden visas in Europe um are very attractive because they don't have any physical presence requirements in order to maintain your residence so if you look at Europe you can see there's a lot of options available in terms of direct to citizenship by investment we can assist this for ultra high net worths in in Austria and in Malta so these are of course EU members so not only do you get a passport that gives you visa-free access to 180 or more countries it's almost as strong as a Singapore passport but you you're an EU member citizen so you effectively have settlement rights across the whole of the European Union so you know we've had clients that have a quiet citizenship in Malta they've moved to Italy their children are working in Germany and studying in in Sweden so it really is the the ultimate sort of flexibility the other one there in if we're looking at Europe is turkey so turkey does also have a citizenship by investment program in Turkey you can invest four hundred thousand dollars into real estate which you can sell after three years or you can put five hundred thousand dollars onto a fixed deposit in a bank account and then maybe I'll say a few things about the Caribbean as well so the Caribbean um has five of these independent commonwealth countries uh where you can acquire citizenship through a significant investment so the Caribbean has the model is the same across the five countries you either donate money to a government fund or you can buy real estate so the donation can range anywhere from a hundred hundred thousand U.S to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a family or you can invest into real estate anywhere from 200 to 400 000 which you can sell after five years but the whole process can be done remotely we have teams on all the islands and we have that large Global presence and so we can assist clients to acquire citizenship by investment in the Caribbean completely remotely and the reason for that as I said there if they're commonwealth countries so they have very good passports from a travel perspective so if you become a citizen of Antigua Buddha as an example I can donate to 100 000 to the government and I my family of four will get passports which now give us visa-free access to the whole European Schengen area to the UK Singapore Hong Kong and 150 odd other countries if you look at the Middle East so I'm I'm based in Dubai the Middle East also now starts to you know launch their own investment migration programs and particularly in Dubai itself they have these golden visas ten-year golden visas that are available um that's available if you invest 2 million Dirhams so about 550 000 U.S into real estate or purely if you're a very successful highly qualified senior executive that earns over 30 000 Dirhams about ten thousand dollars a month so the golden visas in Dubai are very popular another thing we see with a lot of our clients is actually they they develop a portfolio of these so you don't you don't only have to do one citizenship by investment program the way the way the world is the way I can truly protect my family is actually to have multiple bases around the world if anything covert taught us as well is that I don't have to live outside the factory door so I can do my job anywhere so why wouldn't Target a Dubai golden Visa a Caribbean passport that gives me six months a year in the UK and maybe permanent residents down in Australia New Zealand a Thailand Elite visa and then I can move with my family to three or four jurisdictions Around the World quite easily because I actually have developed a portfolio of residents and citizenship so that's that's pretty much it from me um I know it's probably a different topic to what you've mostly heard uh today and yesterday as I said that QR code there will give you access to um all of our reports and indexes and thought leadership that we do put out and if anyone has any questions or would like to find out more please come and have a word thank you