November 2014

Wealth Management is a financial services division that has become an important focus for many of our clients across the region over the last decade. Financial services firms are taking advantage of the burgeoning amount of private wealth available in Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Across Asia there is a huge amount of private wealth being generated as large economies are expanding and populations continue to increase. Hong Kong and Singapore have become stable investment locations and players in Asia-Pacific are keen to capture the large amounts of private wealth being propagated in these rapidly growing Asian countries.

Asia-Pacific leads the world in its number of High-Net-Worth Individuals. These HNWIs grew their wealth at about twice the rate of their counterparts in the rest of the world last year. They are also thinking more innovatively than the globe’s other super wealthy individuals. Over 80% of them expect to be conducting much of their wealth management business digitally over the next five years. This includes mobile applications, social media and video.

In Australia the private wealth industry is focused on targeting a more established High-Net-Worth community, although the landscape within private wealth management has changed over the last ten years with the introduction of self-managed super funds and an increasingly sophisticated client base.

Earlier this year Boston Consulting Group produced a report on the global private wealth industry and, as expected, global private banks have become increasingly focused on Asia-Pacific as a region for growth.