Strategy

Bank Of Singapore's Family Office Business Push

Tom Burroughes Group Editor 15 June 2020

Bank Of Singapore's Family Office Business Push

The move will put the bank up against a number of large institutions which see family offices and external asset managers as important sources of business, providing them with the kind of services too expensive to supply in-house.

Bank of Singapore intends to fight for a larger share of family office business by expanding its investment products and targeting clients outside the region, its chief executive said late last week. Such a step will pit the bank against the likes of UBS, Credit Suisse, Citi Private Bank and local names such as DBS.

“The family office is a big segment, not only from China but also from the Middle East as well as other parts of the world,” Bahren Shaari told Reuters in an interview. The bank confirmed the details of the report to WealthBriefingAsia on Friday. 

BoS, part of OCBC, is going after ultra-high net worth wealth at a time when other lenders are also looking at the sector, to provide a range of services from custody to outsourced chief investment office functions. Asia-Pacific’s first-generation entrepreneurs are starting to build dynasties and thinking of how to protect what they have created. The region’s family offices market is relatively young compared with that of North America and Western Europe. 

As the newswire story noted, BoS wants to regain AuM after assets slipped to $104 billion in the year to March from $108 billion a year ago due to the market downturn. However, assets of the segment catering for family offices rose by 20 per cent.

“There is wealth transfer happening between the first generation to the next generation. Managing money in the past was a part-time business, now it’s a full-time business,” Bahren was quoted as saying.

“There is a big interest in private markets. We make sure we have a complete offering on hedge funds, private equity, direct investments and real estate. That has grown quite a fair bit over the last one year.”

Bank of Singapore is also evaluating setting up an onshore presence in China at a time when Beijing’s crackdown on shadow banking is pushing investors to the mainstream wealth management business, the report said. “We look at the opportunities. Of course, there’s an urgency to really look at what we can do onshore,” he said.

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