The number of mainlanders who came to Hong Kong to open a new account at Standard Chartered in the first two months this year is 3.5 times greater than in the same period last year and higher than in the same period in 2019, Man said.
Standard Chartered’s insurance sales to mainland visitors in the first two months of 2023 have already surpassed last year’s total sales in terms of annualised premiums, and Man believes the bank’s insurance sales to mainlanders will return to pre-Covid levels in the second quarter.
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For the industry as a whole, mainlanders spent HK$1 billion (US$127.4 million) on new individual life-insurance policies in the first nine months of 2022, accounting for 0.9 per cent of the overall premium, according to Insurance Authority data.
This is a far cry from the HK$43.4 billion mainlanders spent on such policies in Hong Kong in 2019, accounting for 25 per cent of the total. During a peak in 2016, they bought HK$72.68 billion worth of policies, representing 39 per cent of all premiums collected in the city.
Standard Chartered last year set up a luxury wealth-management centre in a tourist hotspot in Causeway Bay, following a similar centre set up in Tsim Sha Tsui earlier.
“While many customers like to use digital banking to handle their transactions and investments, they also like to meet with their relationship manager in person at our centres to discuss their investment and insurance plans,” Man said.
“As such, we will continue to expand in physical wealth-management centres as well as our digital platforms.”
As part of that process, the bank has turned its Exchange Square branch in Central into a green branch, which is using digital systems and robots to serve customers.
“This is an experience to see how we can combine digital, green concepts with our wealth-management customers,” Man said. “The green branch is designed in a way that cuts down manual processes that could save 300,000 pieces of paper in a year.”
The digital move will not lead to a reduction in workers, as the bank plans to double its wealth-management team focused on the Greater Bay Area (GBA) to 100.
One in three new cross-border customers is from the GBA, Man said.
Beijing introduced a GBA development plan in February 2019 to turn Hong Kong, Macau and nine cities in Guangdong province into an integrated economic powerhouse.
There are around 80,000 ultra-high-net-worth families – defined as having more than US$30 million in investible assets – in China, of which more than 20 per cent live in the Greater Bay Area, according to the Hong Kong government.
Shares of Standard Chartered, as well as those of Swire Pacific, L’Occitane, and Samsonite, will be accessible to mainland China investors starting on March 13 in an expanded Stock Connect cross-border trading scheme. The company’s share price rose 0.5 per cent to close at HK$74.50 last Friday before the announcement, and has risen 56 per cent during the past year.
