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Big global banks have relocated senior managers to Hong Kong and are boosting teams in response to a surge of stock listings and dealmaking in the Asian financial hub.
Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered, Citigroup and DBS have started hiring in the city to meet growing demand for banking and wealth services, according to people familiar with the situation.
While analysts said that bank staffing was not at pre-pandemic levels, the city’s finance sector has been gaining impetus as a result of the surge in Chinese companies using the territory as an offshore funding venue. The number of companies applying for a Hong Kong initial public offering hit an all-time high in the first six months of this year.
“Hong Kong lost some momentum for a few years during the pandemic, but it now has a renewed identity given its role as the gateway to mainland China, and it is thriving,” said Ole Matthiessen, head of corporate bank for Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa at Deutsche Bank.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index is up more than 30 per cent since the start of the year, one of the top performing indices worldwide, partly because of enthusiasm over artificial intelligence.
Winki Wong, a financial services headhunter at Links International, said she was seeing a 30-40 per cent increase in the number of positions she was being asked to fill in Hong Kong compared with last year.
“It started to increase early this year because of the increase in IPOs and M&A in Hong Kong,” she said.
Deutsche Bank has relocated 50 staff to the city over the past two years and has increased its dealmaking team by 10 per cent. This year, the bank has hired Eric Whorton, a managing director in the bank’s origination and advisory team, and Andrew Maynard as executive head for stocks in the Apac region.
JPMorgan has hired 16 new managing directors, who are just below senior executive level, in Hong Kong this year, and has been relocating staff from across Asia, the US and Europe.
UK-listed bank Standard Chartered has been expanding in the city, with 10 senior executives joining this year, as well as one global head who relocated to Hong Kong, according to people with knowledge of the moves.
Kher Sheng Lee, co-head of Apac at the Alternative Investment Management Association, said some finance professionals who moved to Singapore from Hong Kong at the height of the pandemic were beginning to return.
In one case, about a dozen traders at French bank Société Générale who switched to Singapore three years ago have since moved back.
“Some crisis-era moves were tours of duty to keep jobs, not permanent exile — they were corporate mandates to seed new Singapore offices,” Lee said.
Bankers are returning “with missions now complete and Hong Kong resurgent”, added Lee.
Wealth management has also been a growing market for international lenders and private banks.
Singapore’s DBS responded by ramping up hires in its Hong Kong wealth management team last year. This year, it has hired an additional 100 relationship managers across its Hong Kong and Singapore offices, the bank told the Financial Times.
At the FT Banking Summit Asia in September, Marc Luet, head of Japan, Asia North and Australia at Citigroup, said the US lender planned to increase the number of its wealth managers in Hong Kong and Singapore by 10 per cent this year.
“We are growing our footprint in terms of advisers and bankers to deal with the increased client demand,” he said.
In Singapore, some fear the city-state will lose its competitive edge if it is unable to convince enough local companies to list on the domestic stock market.
“If our best companies choose to list overseas, the implications go far beyond SGX Group,” warned the exchange’s chair Koh Boon Hwee in his annual letter to shareholders.
“Singapore may remain a booking centre, but the talent, innovation and higher-value margins will find their home elsewhere.”
