Over the past centuries, private banks have developed stable and highly lucrative value propositions to serve their clients. They were built on an integrated value chain comprising administration, asset management and advice. Long-term demographic, political, and fiscal trends suggest that private banking will remain an attractive business in the foreseeable future. After an overshooting of returns during the nineties, traditional value propositions came under pressure. Extraordinary rates of return triggered substantial entry from banking, near- and non-banking actors. By 1999 it became evident that several trends were conspiring to undermine existing value propositions and customer loyalty, initiating a fragmentation of the traditional value chain. Three trends were particularly salient: lower financial returns, commoditization and rising complexity. Combined, these trends threaten the core asset that lies at the heart of private banks' ability to create value for their owners: a deep client relationship with extremely wealthy individuals. In response to these trends, private banks made adjustments: creating adequate market structures, where wealth managers no longer operate according to office location, but according to the domicile of the client; creating specialist teams and family offices for U-HNWIs, offering integrated wealth management solutions adapted to specific tax and legal requirements; and creating tailored advisory services such as active portfolio advice and portfolio supervision in the domain of financial asset management. This paper proposes to go a step further. To retain or grab a leadership position in the HNWI and U-HNWI segments, banks must scrutinize their value propositions, strategies and scope of offerings. Excellence in asset management will remain a necessary condition for success. But if you cannot consistently outperform the competition, it is critical to differentiate yourself by being better in some other dimension that is highly valued by your customer and not easily replicated. This calls for a bold strategy that goes beyond positioning the company in a given industry space through mergers and acquisitions. Instead one must focus on shaping the space in ways that will ensure superior profitability and durable customer relations with HNWIs and U-HNWIs well into the future. To deliver superior returns, the strategy must deepen the general client relationship in a sustainable fashion; differentiate the bank from competitors and be difficult to replicate; and optimally target the HNWI and U-HNWI segments. Drawing on research from a wide range of the social sciences, this paper argues that the way forward is a nontraditional value proposition centering on strategic giving to create personal and family legacies. Section 2 develops a taxonomy to segment clients according to legacy needs. Section 3 discusses how to implement the value proposition. Section 4 concludes.