It has become a cliché to observe that the pandemic has accelerated existing trends across a wide range of industries. In wealth management, for example, experts say that the experience of the past year is speeding up moves towards digitisation, automation, centralisation and remote access.

Within a year of its 1847-founding in a Berlin courtyard, Siemens had built Europe’s first long-distance telegraph line. Before the turn of the century, it had laid more than half the undersea cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The next hundred years saw the company grow into a sprawling conglomerate, touching everything from household appliances to power generation, telecommunications to trains, health technology to heavy industry.