Banks headquartered in the West must be mindful of how penetrating Asia’s wealth management market pits them against up and coming domestic rivals, according to DBS, as the Singapore-listed bank reflected on last week’s completion of its purchase of Societe Generale’s Asia private bank.

Banks headquartered in the West must be mindful of how penetrating Asia’s wealth management market pits them against up and coming domestic rivals, according to DBS, as the Singapore-listed bank reflected on last week’s completion of its purchase of Societe Generale’s Asia private bank.

"The global players continue to be dominant in this market but what's different is that the regional banks are up and rising," DBS Private Bank's managing director Januar Tjandra was quoted by the South China Morning Post as saying. Starting in 2010, under the management of chief executive Piyush Gupta, DBS has focused more on and medium-sized enterprise lending and wealth management. The wealth management business doubled between 2010 and 2013, Tjandra was quoted as saying.

Following the $220 million purchase of the Asia private bank from Societe Generale, DBS said its high net worth assets under management and assets under management for all wealth customers are now S$88 billion ($68.8 billion) and S$129 billion respectively. The deal, initially announced in March, represented a price equal to around 1.75 per cent of the S$16 billion of assets held by the SocGen Asia private bank as at 31 December 2014.

A hard number on how much of any attrition of SocGen money there has been in the ensuing transfer period to DBS will not be probably disclosed until DBS issues its third-quarter or full-year results. (A European bank executive recently told this publication that an attrition rate of around 30 per cent was considered the average amount in M&A deals.)

Another example of how domestic Asian banks are consolidating and expanding market reach came from the recent agreement on a three-way merger of Malaysian banks. (To see more on that story, click here.)