Standard Chartered intensifies wealth push

Standard Chartered is making a $1.5bn bet on the future of its wealth management business, as it shifts its focus to ‘affluent’ clients, particularly in Asia, where wealth creation continues to outpace global trends.

Leading the effort is Samir Subberwal, the bank’s chief client officer and global head of wealth solutions, deposits and mortgages. Since taking on the dual role in April 2024 and relocating from Hong Kong to Singapore, Mr Subberwal, a veteran of the bank with more than 30 years’ experience, has begun overhauling the business.

While Standard Chartered has long served clients across the wealth spectrum, it is now narrowing its focus to the ‘affluent’ segment, which includes priority banking clients with investible assets of $150,000 to $1m, priority private clients with $1m to $10m and private banking clients with more than $10m.

“We used to be a bank for all segments, but we want to focus our energies more to the affluent segment,” says Mr Subberwal. “The returns on this segment are significantly higher than returns on the mass market segment.”

In December 2024, the bank set two main targets: to attract $200bn in net new money and achieve double-digit income growth from its wealth division over the next five years. The $1.5bn investment, twice its previous investment, is being channelled into: hiring and developing relationship managers (RMs) and wealth specialists; brand-building through increased marketing; upgrading physical infrastructure, including priority private centres; and enhancing digital tools, from self-directed mobile platforms to hybrid advisory and integrated systems.

“We were spending half of this already. What’s changed is the scale and urgency,” says Mr Subberwal.

Those goals followed a year of strong momentum. In 2024, assets under management among affluent clients rose 35 per cent to $367bn. Net new money reached $44bn, up from $27bn in 2023, while 265,000 new affluent clients were onboarded.

Deep-rooted franchises

The broader regional outlook supports the bank’s ambitions. The Asia-Pacific region recorded a 5 per cent increase in numbers of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) in 2024 and is expected to account for nearly half of all new HNWIs globally between 2025 and 2028, according to The Knight Frank Wealth Report 2025.

Mr Subberwal argues that Standard Chartered is well placed to capture regional growth, with deep-rooted franchises in China, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Asean area. “We believe we can take a sizeable share of that opportunity,” he says.

The bank operates at both ends of the cross-border wealth flow, serving clients in originating markets and booking their assets in key hubs. Hong Kong, Singapore, the UAE and Jersey remain the four main booking centres. “We are seeing increasing wealth flows finding their way outside of the home market,” he says, driven by growing demand from “global Chinese and global Indian clients”, as well as investors from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.

He points to three main client types among global Chinese and Indians: entrepreneurs, professionals seeking diversification and families investing abroad as children study overseas. “There is already a huge amount of wealth created in China, and India’s wealth creation will accelerate in the next decade,” he says, citing strong fundamentals and government support.

The UAE is a strategic growth priority for the bank, serving as a key booking centre for clients across the Middle East and Asia.

Broader investment range

The bank’s wealth strategy rests on three different business lines. The first is managed investments, via an open architecture model. By partnering with firms such as Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, RDM and Pimco, it offers access to a broad mix of public and private funds without pushing its own products, a structure Mr Subberwal says gives clients more choice.

The second is a capital markets platform offering fixed income, foreign exchange, equities, structured products and wealth lending. Bancassurance forms the third, led by a longstanding partnership with Prudential, providing solutions from savings and protection to estate planning. A central omnichannel delivery team supports all three businesses, working across digital, mobile, hybrid and in-person channels.

Diversification across asset classes and booking centres has becoming increasingly important as clients navigate rising geopolitical and regulatory uncertainty, says Mr Subberwal. In response, Standard Chartered is adapting its wealth offering, particularly among ultra- and high net worth individuals.

The bank is broadening its managed investment range, adding funds focused on Europe and emerging markets. Its structured products offer exposure to a mix of underlying assets, including European and Chinese equities, interest rates and currencies. Although the bank holds an overweight position on equities, its house view points to a gradual shift.  “It’s not yet the end of US exceptionalism, but potentially pausing,” says Mr Subberwal. With the dollar expected to further weaken over the next year, currency diversification remains a key priority.

“With so much change around regulations and inheritance tax, clients are also seeking booking centre diversification, so they can move money easily across jurisdictions,” he adds.

In-house analytics

Technology is central to the bank’s wealth transformation. Its proprietary MyWealth platform helps RMs assess portfolio diversification in line with the CIO house view. It is now being extended directly to clients, who can request reviews, receive tailored recommendations and act via the mobile app.

Hybrid tools such as MyRM allow clients to chat securely with their RM, approve documents and execute trades in real time. A digital shopping cart for structured products is also gaining traction. “In one month, in Hong Kong, 75 per cent of our structured deposits have moved to the shopping cart,” says Mr Subberwal.

The next phase is driven by AI. “We just created a plan to build an infrastructure that enables our RMs to engage customers using AI,” he says. Generative and agentic AI are being deployed to support RMs and, in time, direct client interactions.

In Hong Kong and Singapore, AI-driven segmentation and personalised marketing, developed with Accenture, are already in use. In-house analytics models identify the next best product and an automated engine in the mobile app determines how and when to present offers.

These capabilities, tailored increasingly to women and next-generation clients, will expand to other markets as investments are rolled out. “Generational transfer of wealth is going to be a big event over the next 10–15 years, and the next generation will engage differently with the bank than what their parents did,” he adds.

The goal is to retain clients as their needs evolve, offering a “holistic range of services” from savings products to trust structures and estate planning. “That gives us an ability to upgrade clients seamlessly across the continuum,” says Mr Subberwal.

Alongside technology, talent remains critical. The bank runs succession and leadership programmes, sponsors Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) certification, and partners with the French INSEAD business school to train relationship managers. “But there’s always a big focus on hiring from outside, particularly in the private bank. We have the right products and platforms for RMs to join us. That’s why we’ve been successful in hiring,” he adds.

Work in progress

Whether this mix of scale and specialisation will be enough to satisfy increasingly global and demanding clients remains to be seen.

Elizabeth Hart, chief executive and founder of Legacy Wealth Advisors in Singapore, says Standard Chartered’s ambitions will need to be matched by delivery. While the bank has stepped up its marketing in Asia, she cautions that visibility alone is not enough to build credibility in private banking.

“Large banks often spend millions on marketing campaigns to attract new clients,” she notes. “I believe it would be better to focus first on providing outstanding service to existing clients.”

She highlights a gap between strategy and service, recalling a case where a client was constrained by an operational limitation that did not align with the bank’s strategic decisions. “Standard Chartered Bank needs to become much more flexible in its offering to meet the complex needs of wealthy clients,” she says.

With the ‘Great Wealth Transfer’ under way and families becoming more international, banks must deepen their advisory capabilities, says Ms Hart. “It is an enormous opportunity for fully fledged private banks to provide comprehensive services, including succession planning and family governance.”

Standard Chartered has made “commendable strides in establishing a wealth continuum” across affluent, HNW and UHNW segments, says Vineet Vohra, managing partner at Singapore-based Leader Circuit, which provides search, learning and consulting services.

With “a clear vision and disciplined execution”, the bank is now “among a select group of pioneers, including Citi, HSBC and DBS, who emphatically demonstrate the commercial appeal of a proposition that evolves with client wealth”. Its footprint in Asia, the Middle East and Africa positions it well to capture rapidly growing wealth pools. “Its broad footprint is a differentiator, especially for globally mobile clients,” he says.

But more is needed to compete at the top end. “It has a scalable affluent offering, but for HNW clients, the best in the industry have moved from product sales to advisory solutions,” Mr Vohra notes. “And for UHNW segments, bulge bracket private banks bring their entire institutional might to serve client business — and not just personal — needs.”

A $200bn net new money target is “bold but credible” if it can move beyond a reliance on affluent inflows, deepen its HNW and build up a UHNW franchise, he says. While the group is “trusted in the affluent space” and “competitive in the HNW space”, its ambition to become a global player with a fully developed wealth continuum remains a “work in progress”.

“The trajectory is positive, but the journey from a strong wealth-capable bank to a capable wealth management leader will take time — and some inorganic moves,” concludes Mr Vohra.

The bank’s ambitions also face legal headwinds. In Singapore, liquidators filed a $2.7bn lawsuit in July 2025 linked to the 1MDB scandal, which the bank disputes. At the same time, it is contesting a £1.5bn ($2bn) case in London over alleged breaches of Iran sanctions.