THE head of HSBC Holdings’s private bank is planning a fresh recruiting drive as part of her bid to regain the title of Asia’s biggest wealth manager from UBS Group.
Annabel Spring is looking to deepen the presence of Europe’s biggest lender in Asia across at least half a dozen territories, partly through recruiting extra staff after already poaching wealth advisers from rivals including Deutsche Bank, UBS and Credit Suisse over the past year.
London-based HSBC lost its title as Asia’s biggest wealth manager after UBS took over Credit Suisse a year ago. The Zurich-based bank had US$645 billion of invested assets in Asia for its wealth-management unit at the end of 2023, an increase of almost 50 per cent from a year earlier.
“We are adding people,” said Spring, 54, chief executive officer of HSBC Global Private Banking, which managed US$549 billion in invested assets in Asia at the end of 2023, almost half its global total and up almost 17 per cent from a year earlier. UBS “just set a new target for us”.
Global banks have been building out their wealth-management operations to counter the more volatile earnings derived from dealmaking and trading. HSBC returned to India last year after expanding its presence in other parts of Asia – such as Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines – partly to capitalise on the fortunes booming across the region over the past decade.
A focus on wealth has been a major part of HSBC’s Asia-pivot strategy launched in early 2021 under outgoing chief executive officer Noel Quinn. To further the aim, the bank has undertaken a series of bolt-on deals aimed at bolstering its business, acquiring asset-management operations in India, Singapore and mainland China.
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HSBC has spent years trying to increase its revenue from wealth management, long promising investors that it will capitalise on burgeoning wealth in Asia. But even as the company has convinced clients to hand it tens of billions of US dollars of their assets, income from the business still pales in comparison with rivals such as Morgan Stanley and UBS.
In a presentation last month at a Goldman Sachs financial-services conference in Madrid, Nuno Matos, head of HSBC’s wealth and personal banking division, said the bank intended to accelerate its push into Asian wealth and pointed to an 8 per cent year-over-year increase in global wealth revenue, to US$7.5 billion, in 2023.
Also last month, HSBC unveiled plans to have three wealth centres in Singapore by early 2025 and completed the acquisition of Citigroup’s retail wealth-management portfolio in mainland China, adding about US$3.6 billion in assets and deposits along with more than 300 employees.
Recent HSBC hires include former UBS executive Kerri Lim as head of its ultra-high-net-worth segment for Asia, while Lok Yim joined in late 2023 to lead global private banking in the Asia-Pacific region after 16 years at Deutsche Bank. Outside Asia, HSBC hired half a dozen private bankers from Credit Suisse last year to boost services in the Middle East and Europe.
“We want to make sure that we have absolutely scaled businesses in every area that we have entered,” Spring said. “We are really going to embed in those markets.”
Spring said she was unable to comment on Quinn’s April announcement that he plans to step down or the impact of the move on HSBC.
A native of Australia, Spring began her finance career at Morgan Stanley three decades ago after studying economics and law and deciding against pursuing a career as a barrister.
One of her early Wall Street deals included working on the 1995 acquisition of food conglomerate Borden by the company now known as KKR. The private equity giant bought Borden through shares of RJR Nabisco, the company at the centre of Bryan Burrough and John Helyar ’s 1989 book Barbarians at the Gate.
“And so there I was, looking at Henry Kravis down the end of the table,” said Spring, who read the book that featured KKR’s co-founder while in high school and recently met him again as part of her HSBC work. “That was a great start on Wall Street.”
Spring eventually rose to become Morgan Stanley’s global head of firm strategy after working between New York, Sydney and Hong Kong. She left the Wall Street giant after more than a decade to take on a similar role at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where she later gained experience in wealth-management businesses.
Spring ended up joining HSBC in 2019 following conversations with one of its executives, Charlie Nunn, a contact of Commonwealth’s CEO at the time, Ian Narev. Nunn has since moved on from HSBC to run Lloyds Banking Group, which focuses on the UK banking market, but Spring is keeping her gaze fixed on the global wealth-management space.
“We want to be Asia’s leading wealth manager, but also we are very strong in the Middle East,” she said. “One of the promises of HSBC is that you have truly an international experience.” BLOOMBERG
