Royal Bank of Scotland is targeting 50,000 new private banking clients in its first three years in China according to Gordon Pell, chairman ...

Royal Bank of Scotland is targeting 50,000 new private banking clients in its first three years in China according to Gordon Pell, chairman of wealth management at RBS. The bank’s first two private banking branches, one on Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the other in Shanghai, will be operational within two months. A further 23 are planned across the country. RBS is targeting private banking clients with at least $1 million of investible assets. In China, RBS has a strategic partnership with Bank of China in which it has invested $1.6 billion. The new branches may be co-branded between Bank of China and RBS, or under the bank's Coutts brand. Mr Pell said that he expects to expand significantly RBS's current workforce of 300 wealth management staff in Hong Kong and in Singapore and that they will concentrate solidly on China. "Our product in the beginning will be an upmarket banking product - whether you have £1 million or £10, at the moment in China you join the same queue. It is still that undifferentiated,” said Mr Pell. "Our aim, first thing, is to position it very much similar to Coutts UK - a very strong up-market proposition and service-orientated, and then have an investment related business bolted on to it. We are talking about a client base within the first three of years which could be larger than we have in the UK, which is 50,000, which were gained over 300 years. The scale of everything in China is astronomical.”