Stepping up the search for talent

Wealth managers in the City-state of Singapore are stepping up their recruitment drives in a country whose tight labour market means loyalty of top financial teams is hard to buy.

“In this part of Asia, skills and talent are not growing as fast as wealth. Our challenge is how to deal with this in a cultural context,” said Anurag Mahesh, head of Global Investment Services for Asia Pacific at Deutsche Private Wealth Management in Singapore.

Since the turn of the New Year, Deutsche has hired Eleonore Dachicourt, a rising figure in alternative investments, from Credit Suisse, to head up hedge fund sales to Asian private clients, and Tony Tang from Citigroup as head of client solutions.

This follows a swoop for seven staff from local private banking rivals such as DBS, RBS Coutts, ABN Amro and Société Générale Private Bank in the autumn of last year.

The German institution’s Asian private banking unit aims to recruit more than 60 relationship managers over the next two years, adding to the 220 client advisers it currently employs out of 700 staff in the region. The added staff numbers are in response to plans to double the size of Deutsche’s wealth assets in Asia by 2012 from the current $39bn.

The type of ultra high net worth entrepreneurial clients which private banks service in Asia have not been hit so hard by the financial crisis, claims Mr Mahesh. The crisis hit markets and buyers of Lehman-related structured products rather than affecting banking, securitisation and the economy in a fundamental fashion.

“Despite the crisis, SMEs and listed companies, who provide our main clients, have shown extraordinary resilience,” says Mr Mahesh.

Singapore’s households registered a record net worth of S$1,160bn ($900bn) in the third quarter of 2010, powered by soaring property prices, according to annual figures from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

According to well-informed sources in Asian private banking, Deutsche drew up a regional hit-list of desired hires in rival groups and secured most of its targeted signatures. Instead of splitting staff into segregated and competing country teams, a more fluid structure allows team members to cover for one another across the Asian region. “They are very ambitious and innovative, with a strong capital markets division behind the private bank,” Singapore consultant.

But taking market share from leading local players such as the country’s largest bank DBS – led since mid-April 2010 by celebrity banker Su Shan Tan, who famously recalled staff at Morgan Stanley in the early hours of the morning at the height of the financial crisis – will be no walk in the park.

“My junior assistants used to come in their pyjamas and flip-flops every night to be on standby during September 2008,” Ms Tan told PWM Asia. “You learn life lessons in a crisis.”

‘In this part of Asia, skills and talent are not growing as fast as wealth. Our challenge is how to deal with this in a cultural context’
Anurag Mahesh, Deutsche Private Wealth