The global market for concierge medicine is, on some estimates, going to be worth more than $41 billion by 2035. We talk to an emergency medicine business that works with wealthy individuals, and take views from RBC about the sector.
(An earlier version of this article appeared in Family Wealth
Report, sister news service to this one.)
The ever-evolving world of concierge business, which this news
service has
explored already, speaks to how wealth management goes beyond
investment and tax.
For example, at RBC Echelon, a lifestyle services platform of
RBC
Wealth Management aimed at ultra-high net worth clients,
the offerings cover areas such as philanthropy consulting, art
advisory, education consulting, private aviation, personal and
cybersecurity consulting, private health care and bill pay. As
shown below, a raft of banks that serve HNW and UHNW clients have
concierge channels.
One of the terms on RBC Echelon’s list that caught this
publication’s eye was private healthcare. For no matter how
well off someone is, health can be more urgent as a priority.
Having access to medical care when and where you want it is the
sort of power that wealth can bring, whatever that says about
political arguments on how healthcare should be be provided.
Wealth creates options.
Concierge medicine is expected to grow globally to almost $41.37
billion by 2035 from $23.23 billion this year, a compound annual
growth rate of 6.63 per cent, according to Precedence
Research. There are several health and medical care
providers working with HNW and ultra-HNW individuals. One firm of
this type that has been familiar to this news service for
more than a decade is Black Bag, which provides
global emergency medicine. It was founded by Chris Sidford, MD.
Sidford has almost 30 years’ experience working in medical
institutions and, prior to that, he was a US Navy
officer, serving as a faculty member of the Emergency Medicine
Residency training programme.
We asked Sidford what has changed in recent years in his
sector.
“There’s now a much sharper awareness among our clients of just
how difficult it can be to access and navigate healthcare; it is
an awareness that has grown in step with their increasingly
nomadic lifestyles,” Sidford said.
“Historically, our attention, and theirs, was concentrated on
remote and developing-market destinations, where the gaps in
healthcare infrastructure were obvious and expected.
“The pandemic changed that calculus. It exposed real fragility in
healthcare systems everywhere, including places clients had
always assumed were reliably well-served. The result is that
families and individuals now recognise this isn’t a risk confined
to exotic or underdeveloped locations. It’s a pervasive,
location-independent vulnerability, and they plan for it
accordingly, regardless of where in the world they happen to be,”
he continued.
“Rather than viewing us as a specialised resource reserved for
expedition-style or international travel, they increasingly see
us as a standing layer of healthcare infrastructure. It is an
integrated extension of their lives that travels with them
wherever home happens to be that year,” Sidford said.
Mention of the pandemic reminds this news service of how access
to healthcare or the struggle to obtain it sharpened
conversations. It brought fears to the surface. Perhaps it is no
accident that specialists in healthcare and medicine have cropped
up several times in the Family Wealth Report annual
awards in specialist categories over recent years. There are
organisations such as The Howell Legacy Group,
which won an award for Healthcare Services in the 2026 Family
Wealth Report Awards; another firm, winning an FWR
award in 2024, is TrustHouse (see
here).
Trends, enthusiasms and risks
Sidford said several trends are emerging in his field.
There is a “steady, sustained level of interest in medical
tourism, as clients look abroad for procedures that are either
more affordable or more readily accessible than what’s available
through their home healthcare systems,” he said.
“This is especially pronounced in plastic surgery and
regenerative medicine, where cost differentials and shorter wait
times abroad remain significant draws.”
“The second, and arguably the more dominant trend, is longevity
and brain health. It now sits at the top of nearly every client
conversation,” he said. “Encouragingly, the strongest and
best-supported interventions are also the simplest: quality
sleep, a disciplined diet, consistent exercise, and avoidance of
sleep aids, recreational drugs, and excessive alcohol. Of these,
strength and muscle-building work deserves emphasis, as research
increasingly ties it to healthy ageing.
“We’re also seeing growing interest in the social and cognitive
dimensions of longevity: maintaining active social networks and
pursuing ongoing learning, both increasingly recognised as
protective for long-term brain health,” Sidford
continued.
There are grounds for caution amidst all the scientific buzz,
however.
“Two areas warrant a more cautious note. Peptide therapies are
generating tremendous enthusiasm among our clientele, but the
well-controlled human clinical evidence has not caught up with
that enthusiasm,” Sidford said. “Client demand is running ahead
of the science, and we counsel accordingly. Similarly, GLP-1
medications remain front and centre in longevity conversations,
valued for their legitimate metabolic benefits but increasingly
used off label or without supervision in pursuit of longevity
outcomes they weren’t necessarily designed or tested for.”
This news service sked him how Black Bag works alongside the
rest of the wealth management/private client ecosystem.
“We’ve worked with several family office organisations over the
past decade or so, as well as with individual family offices and
trust and estate professionals directly. They’re often the first
to recognise when a client’s health and travel profile calls for
this kind of dedicated support.
“We also work closely alongside executive protection
professionals, including individuals with backgrounds in the FBI
and Secret Service, and security teams from major sports
organisations around the globe. In some cases, we partner
directly with those security teams; in others, we work with
individual protection professionals. Together, we regularly give
presentations to families, family offices, and their advisors on
the risks associated with international travel and the preventive
measures available to manage them. This is positioning medical
preparedness as a natural complement to physical security
planning, rather than a separate consideration,” Sidford said.
Rising wealth tide
In the RBC Echelon list of services mentioned above, RBC said
earlier this year that in the US, it plans to more than double
the number of households for its UHNW segment by the year 2030.
Concierge will be a part of that.
These services tend to be used by UHNW clients which is the
fastest growing segment in the world according to a 2026
Atrata World Altra Wealth Report, with a 15 per cent growth
rate from 2025 in the US. This growth tends to be focused on
major markets along the east coast and west coast as well as
Texas and Chicago.
There is a confidence that comes with having access to services
that have gone through a screening process and used by other RBC
clients, Bill Ringham, director of private wealth strategies, who
leads the RBC Echelon platform, said. “Clients appreciate that
they have access to these services with the confidence that RBC
Wealth Management has vetted the service and other clients like
them are also using the service,” he said. For banks such as RBC,
concierge gives an added bit of “glue” to a relationship.
Other banks agree. At Citigroup, for example, its Citigold
Private Client offering provides curated lifestyle privileges,
exclusive wealth and lifestyle event invitations. Switzerland’s
largest bank, UBS, offers two main concierge services: a Wealth
Concierge for day-to-day administrative and lifestyle needs, and
an exclusive, travel-focused Visa Concierge for cardholders. JP
Morgan Private Bank and Bank of America Private Bank have various
offerings among a large field. In Singapore, examples include DBS
Private Bank and UOB Private Bank.
And it is hard not to see concierge as tapping into a thirst for
travel and adventure that was squashed by lockdowns. For Sidford,
he knows the wanderlust of wealthy clients is easier to handle if
medical care is within reach.
“Several of our clients live internationally full-time, based out
of South America, Africa, and Europe. Beyond that established
base, we’re seeing a steady increase in individual,
expedition-style trips, such as extended private yacht tours,
African safaris, mountaineering and climbing expeditions, and
adventure and social travel to destinations such as Machu Picchu,
Kilimanjaro, and Patagonia.
“That footprint shapes how we build our provider and logistics
networks. We’re not just planning for major population centres,
but for genuinely remote itineraries, where evacuation logistics,
altitude and environmental medicine, and communication
reliability all need to be addressed in advance, not improvised
in the moment,” Sidford concluded.