Fintech & Payments

Inside Noah’s Black Diamond Summit: How AI Is Rewriting the Future of Global Wealth

As global financial landscapes shift, Noah outlines a new AI-first approach to helping families protect and grow their wealth.

Updated

January 8, 2026 6:31 PM

Noah’s Black Diamond Summit. PHOTO: ARK WEALTH

Noah Holdings, one of Asia’s leading wealth management firms serving global Chinese high-net-worth families, hosted its annual Black Diamond Summit in Macau from December 7–11. The city has become a significant gathering place for Noah’s community, where clients, partners, and experts converge each year to explore how global trends are transforming wealth and family life. This year’s theme, “AI Together, Co-Generating the Future”, set the tone for a conversation about how modern wealth management must adapt in an age defined by artificial intelligence.

More than 3,000 attendees joined discussions that connected technology, global mobility, and long-term family planning. The Summit built on earlier sessions held in Shanghai, creating a continuous dialogue around one central question: how can families prepare for a world that is becoming more digital, more complex and more interconnected?

A major moment came when Noah introduced “Noya”, its new AI Relationship Manager. Noya is now part of the upgraded iARK Hong Kong and Singapore apps. It is built to support licensed human advisors, not replace them. The goal is simple: combine human judgment with AI intelligence to help clients understand their wealth more clearly and manage it across borders. Noya offers real-time insights, deeper personalisation, cleaner access to global financial information, smoother coordination between regions, and end-to-end execution through Noah’s global booking centres.

The Summit’s tone shifted toward long-term thinking when Co-Founder and Chairwoman Norah Wang delivered her keynote, “From Chaos to Clarity: Building a Global Operating System for Wealth Management”. She reflected on twenty years of serving more than 400,000 clients and explained that families today face new pressures. As she put it, “The real pain point for Chinese families today is not investment performance, but navigating the growing complexities of a global lifestyle”. Her message was straightforward: wealth is no longer just about returns. It is about managing uncertainty in a world where technology, geopolitics, and mobility collide.

Wang described how two major shifts have shaped modern wealth—first the Internet Era, which changed how people built wealth, and now what she calls the AI Civilisation Era, which is changing how people must protect it. She outlined the forces that influence today’s decisions: geopolitical shifts, persistent inflation, the rising importance of security and supply-chain technologies, the spread of AI, and the need for stronger family governance across generations. Each of these factors adds complexity, and families need tools that help them see the bigger picture.

To respond to this reality, Noah presented its integrated global wealth infrastructure. It is built on three pillars:

  • Olive, which focuses on asset management and global investment growth
  • Glory, which supports families in governance, succession planning, and legacy architecture
  • ARK, the company’s global booking and execution centre, which enables cross-border wealth operations

Together, these pillars function as an AI-supported system designed to simplify global complexity and help families preserve long-term stability.

One of the most discussed conversations featured Noah’s CEO, Zander Yin, and Tony Shale, Co-Founder & Chairman of Asian Private Banker China. They spoke about how AI is transforming private banking in Asia. Their view was that wealth management is moving from a product-centred model to one led by insight, trust, and human-tech collaboration. AI may accelerate analysis, but human expertise will continue to guide judgment, relationships, and long-term strategy.

The closing message of the Summit centred on redefining what prosperity means in an AI-driven age. For Noah, wealth is no longer a destination. It is an ongoing journey through a world that is increasingly fast-moving and unpredictable. As Wang noted, “With AI reshaping the very foundations of civilisation, wealth and financial freedom represent not a static endpoint, but a continuous journey. Here, we find our purpose: to help global Chinese investors navigate an increasingly complex world and achieve true prosperity, supported by resilient wealth management infrastructure and deep human expertise”.

The Summit ended on that note—a reminder that the future of wealth is not only about financial assets, but about clarity, confidence and the ability to adapt as the world transforms.

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Talent & Organisation

How Trade Shows Are Evolving to Better Support Small and Mid-Sized Manufacturers

A closer look at PMMI’s FastTrack initiative and why it matters for growing manufacturing firms

Updated

February 13, 2026 10:44 AM

Cardboard boxes in a warehouse. PHOTO: UNSPLASH

Large trade shows are built for scale. But for small and medium-sized manufacturers, that scale often creates distance between what’s on display and what they can actually use. Too many options, too little time, and very few tools designed for companies that are still growing. That mismatch is what PMMI is trying to correct with its new SMB FastTrack Program at PACK EXPO East 2026.

That is the problem PMMI is trying to address with its new SMB FastTrack Program, launching at PACK EXPO East 2026 in Philadelphia.

PMMI — the Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies — is the industry body behind the PACK EXPO trade shows and a central organization in the global packaging and processing sector. Through FastTrack, it has created a program (not an app or a product) designed to help small and mid-sized companies navigate the show more efficiently and connect with solutions that fit their scale.

The idea behind SMB FastTrack is simple: reduce friction. Instead of asking smaller firms to sort through hundreds of exhibitors and sessions on their own, the program curates what is most relevant to them. Exhibitors that offer flexible pricing, right-sized machinery, or SMB-focused services are clearly identified with visual icons in both the online directory and on the show floor. That way, a small manufacturer can quickly distinguish between enterprise-only vendors and partners that are realistically accessible.

The same logic carries into education. Rather than treating all attendees the same, PACK EXPO East 2026 will include a learning track specifically built around SMB realities. These sessions focus on issues that smaller teams actually face—how to hire and train workers, use AI without over-investing, improve food safety, cut operating costs, and adopt technology in stages. The goal is not inspiration, but applicability: content that reflects real constraints, not ideal scenarios.

Planning, too, is built into the structure of the program. Through a dedicated FastTrack landing page, participants can access curated supplier lists, recommended sessions, and planning tools that help organize their time before they ever step onto the show floor. Tools like category search and sustainability finders are meant to narrow choices quickly, turning a massive event into something manageable.

Seen together, these elements point to a broader intention. PMMI is not simply adding features—it is reshaping how smaller manufacturers experience a major industry event. Instead of competing for attention in a space built for scale, SMBs are given clearer paths to the people, tools, and knowledge that match where they actually are in their growth cycle.

What makes SMB FastTrack notable is not the technology behind it, but the intention behind it. PMMI is recognizing that progress for small and mid-sized manufacturers depends less on spectacle and more on fit—solutions that are accessible, affordable, and adaptable. The program is designed to help companies move with purpose, not pressure.

In an industry where visibility often follows size, SMB FastTrack represents a structural shift. It treats small and medium-sized manufacturers not as a subset of the audience, but as a distinct group with distinct needs. By doing so, PMMI is quietly redefining what a trade show can be: not just a marketplace of innovation, but a usable platform for companies still building their next stage of growth.