By Elishya Perera
SINGAPORE (CWBN)_ JP Morgan Chase plans to double the number of private bankers serving Chinese clients from Singapore, the bank’s new head of Southeast Asia said.
According to James Wey, Managing Director and the Head of Southeast Asia for J.P. Morgan Private Bank in Asia, with rapid wealth creation in China, the need has arisen for “insightful advice” on how to manage the new-found wealth, and although the bank has a large team of wealth mangers in Hong Kong, Singapore is the only country in Asia where clients can book assets.
Wey pointed out that as a result of the country’s investor-friendly regulations, Singapore is viewed as a stable hub for wealth management, not just from China, but all over the world.
While all of the private bank’s teams in Singapore will be subject to expansion, Wey said the group serving Chinese clients is expected to grow faster owing to the fact that it was set up less than two years ago.
“Many large Chinese companies are using Singapore as their international headquarters,” he added “With that comes a lot of senior people who have concentrated wealth holdings. They look at how to build that in a smart way for generations to come.”
According to the Annual Wealth Survey issued by Credit Suisse, China overtook the US in rankings of world’s richest people in 2019. The report found that there were 100 million Chinese people among the world’s top 10% of richest people, compared with 99 million in the US.
And among major Chinese firms building up in Singapore are Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance.
JPMorgan, which is competing with Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley in attracting Chinese entrepreneurs who become billionaires, has a net worth that enables the private bank to grow its relationship with clients via lending and provision of other market activities.
Edited by Chathushka Perera
