"It's raining money," said Claus Koerner, head of Deutsche Bank's onshore Russian private bank opened in Moscow in 2004.
"It's not just the petrodollars. Many people with companies are selling up and cashing out. The market is huge," he told Reuters on the sidelines of Moscow's first industry conference.
Recent surveys put the size of assets in the Russian high-net-worth market at between $300 billion and $350 billion, much of it moved out of Russia during the turbulent 1990s.
"Fifteen years ago, there were no Russian clients that I knew of," said Hans-Juergen Koch, head of international private wealth management at Deutche Bank Switzerland.
"Today, Russian private banking clients are international."
Koch told Reuters the Russian offshore private banking market was growing at between 15 and 20 percent a year.
His colleague Koerner estimated that onshore private banking assets in Russia were growing faster at 30 percent a year. He said Deutsche forecasts it will have 1 billion euros of onshore private banking assets under management out of Moscow by 2007.
A recent survey by Boston Consulting Group said Russian private wealth is the fastest growing in the world and is expected to outstrip China and India, rising to $670 billion by 2009. Russia, where private wealth was banned under communism, now has 26 dollar billionaires according to Forbes magazine's 2005 list of the world's richest people.