Division To Focus On Helping Affluent Mainland Chinese Invest In Or Through Hong Kong#
With wealthy mainland Chinese looking for stable investments to diversify their assets beyond real estate or popular "portable" assets like art and jewelry, we're seeing more banks and investment firms starting to offer financial products geared toward this new but fast-growing investor demographic. Today, Bloomberg writes that HSBC plans to dramatically expand its wealth management division in Hong Kong to accommodate the growing number of mainland Chinese investors who want to invest in or through Hong Kong.
HSBC joins rivals including Standard Chartered Plc in expanding businesses that target wealthy clients in the region. Asia-Pacific is forecast to surpass North America by 2013 as the world’s largest private banking market, according to a Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch report.
“The business outlook is fairly positive,” McDonagh said. It is “a fairly competitive market out there” for hiring as rivals are also looking for talent, she said.
BOC Hong Kong (Holdings) Ltd. units are seeking to hire 200 workers, it said earlier this month.
The plan to hire people in Hong Kong for HSBC’s wealth management unit was reported earlier today by Ming Pao Daily News, a Hong Kong-based Chinese language newspaper.
HSBC's decision to add hundreds of staff specializing in mainland wealth management is no real surprise, however -- last year, Didier Brizard, a representative of Tiaré Groupe, told attendees at the Shorex Wealth Management Forum in Singapore that he expects the Chinese wealth management market to surpass Japan's by 2015.
HSBC probably wants to direct as much business as possible to its Hong Kong operations now to take advantage of the relative underdevelopment of the wealth management products currently offered by banks and institutions in mainland China in order to be in a more competitive position as the mainland banking industry matures in coming years.