Singapore: Help with a romance is not something you would normally expect to get at your bank, even if it is a private one, but firms in Asia have to work hard to keep wealthy clients happy.
Private bankers here are brimming with talk of holistic services that go beyond selling investments to offering tax and estate planning, family lawyers, even — if it should be needed — advice on how to manage multiple children and mistresses.
UBS runs seminars for the adult children of its rich clients, where they not only learn about financial products and investments, but also meet their own kind.
It is not exactly a dating service, but Kathryn Shih, head of UBS Wealth Management Asia Pacific, says those who attend "form strong bonds. Some go into business together, some have even got married."
All this effort is needed in a market that is expected to carry on seeing fast growth. There is some $14 trillion of private wealth in Asia, excluding Japan, and only about $3 trillion of that is captured by the industry, according to a report from Oliver Wyman, the consulting firm.
Competition for these assets is tough, especially as Asian clients have been notoriously fickle in switching between banks. Shih says that, with recession in Europe and a slower economy in the US, "Asia Pacific is a very important market right now". Chinese wealth is expected to grow at 14 per cent a year and Indian wealth at 18 per cent, which means the region's share of the global wealth market should grow from 18 per cent to 23 per cent by 2015, she adds.
Ed Lopez, vice-president of Sungard, which makes technology and software used by wealth managers, says his group is seeing a lot of family and multifamily offices springing up in Hong Kong and Singapore, which are a kind of mini-private bank for specific individuals.
Population growth
"The movement of wealth from west to east is not about individuals moving cash out of Switzerland to Singapore, for example, it is more that the wealthy population is growing very fast in Asia," he says.
"There is huge growth in first generation wealth, especially offshore money from China." Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines are also seeing strong growth, but nothing like China, Lopez adds.
Some western banks have been starting to reduce their presence in the region, usually for specific reasons, and not among the European banks one might expect.
For example, HSBC got rid of its Japanese private bank because it was simply too small and the bank was struggling to make money from it, while Macquarie of Australia merged its unit with Julius Baer for similar reasons.
ING, meanwhile, sold out of Asian investment banking as part of its restructuring after taking government money during the financial crisis, while Bank of America Merrill Lynch has put its international wealth business on the block simply because it needs the money. Aside from that, competition is also increasing. Ms Shih says more banks have opened wealth management units in Asia since the financial crisis than have pulled out, which in turn is increasing costs.
Private banking
Meanwhile, says Lopez, some local banks, such as Rizal Commercial Banking Corp in the Philippines, are investing in technology and people to build private banking businesses, so they can exploit the long commercial relationships they have had with wealthy entrepreneurs.
"In the past, once people hit it rich, they'd go to UBS or another established name with their wealth. Now, banks such as RCBC are saying: ‘We have a private bank, stay with us'," Lopez explains.
— Financial Times
