Few areas have been unscathed by the financial turmoil, but Singapore remains a vibrant hub for wealth management. WealthBriefing is running a series of news and features on the city-state.

Singapore has not been able to escape from the financial crisis but despite the losses, the city-state continues to impress as one of the most vibrant financial jurisdictions in the world.

The city-state boasts the strong regulatory environment and tax friendly framework which lured private banks and wealth managers there in the first place.

Also, with Swiss bank secrecy rules under assault, Singapore has an opportunity to win potential business that may flow out of the Alpine state into more welcoming jurisdictions in the future. That said, with so much focus on so-called tax havens, even Singapore cannot expect to be left alone by revenue-hungry governments seeking to halt an exodus of wealthy taxpayers. Like Switzerland, Singapore has endorsed the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's information-sharing standards.

Offshore assets under management in Singapore were $500 billion last year, according to the Boston Consulting Group, and with most of the global private banks well represented in Singapore, it presents as an attractive alternative to Switzerland if secrecy is a priority.

A recent Reuters report hailed Singapore’s financial industry achievements and said the centre was “seeing wealth management prosper as the US and Europe grapple with the worst slump in a generation”.

Such breathlessness might be a slight exaggeration, but private bankers on the ground report that despite the recession, some banks, such as Credit Suisse and Macquarie Group, are still in hiring mode, while the Bank of China is planning a local wealth management operation start-up. BNP Paribas, the French bank, is another which says it will increase its Singapore private banking headcount, announcing plans to add another 100 jobs in Asia, 80 of them in Singapore.

“Sure, we’ve seen some cutbacks from banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland which have big problems at home but there’s a sense here that the crisis is also a challenge, and an opportunity to position yourself well for the upturn,” says one expatriate private banker. He was referring to RBS’s massive losses and its status now as a partly state-owned bank.

“The consensus is that this crisis is just one hiccup in a growth story which will be resumed sometime soon, maybe 2010, maybe 2011,” the banker said.

Those banks, he said, which remained strong in the market would benefit from a strategy of wealthy people to diversify their risk by spreading their assets across more than one private bank.

But not all banks are flourishing. In February, RBS, which has a qualifying full bank licence to enter Singapore’s retail market, said it was reviewing its expansion plans both for its own brand and for RBS Coutts, its private banking unit that is a sister to the UK private bank, Coutts.

Credit Suisse, meanwhile, employs around 5,000 staff in Singapore, which is also the bank’s largest wealth management operation outside of Switzerland.

“Our private bank is a growth business for us,” Kai Nargolwala, chief executive for Credit Suisse for the Asia-Pacific, said earlier this month.

“It is a business that we have been very successful in even through the turbulent times of 2008,” he was reported as saying.

Mr Nargolwala told the Straits Times recently that the bank had raised more than SFr8 billion (around $6.8 billion)of new client money in the region over 2008.

One positive side to the crisis, according to some top bank executives, is that the situation has ended the poaching and hiring spree of the last few years which drove up salaries and made it hard for banks to retain good people.

“Along the way, everything got skewed,” Pierre Baer, chief executive of SG Private Banking for Singapore and South Asia, told journalists recently. “Now it's back to basics.”

SG is also in growth mode, with its headcount up 14 per cent in Asia-Pacific in 2008 to more than 600, and assets under management up by better than 20 per cent to nearly S$30 billion in the region over the year. That has since come back another 10 per cent under the global market pressures.

So for the moment at least, Singapore is very much still a good hunting ground for private bankers.