HSBC is growing its team of wealth advisers and relationship managers nationally in a bid to secure its place among the biggest UK wealth managers.
Europe’s biggest bank is seeking to expand its UK wealth division to replicate the success of its Asian arm and is hoping to become one of Britain’s top five wealth managers by the end of the decade, it said.
The recruitment drive, first reported in the Guardian, is part of ambitions by the bank to double its assets under management to £100 billion ($131 billion) by leveraging its global footprint.
A HSBC spokesperson said: ‘As the UK’s only truly international bank, our international connectivity is our biggest competitive advantage and is driving our growth.
‘Our ambition is to make HSBC UK a Top 5 wealth manager in the UK in the next five years and to reach this status, we want to double the value of our assets under management. In order to fulfil this vision, we are growing our national team of wealth advisors and relationship managers at scale over the next few years.’
HSBC’s CEO for Global Private Banking and Wealth, Annabel Spring recently told Spear’s the UK remained one of the bank’s two ‘home markets’ (alongside Hong Kong), its ‘regulatory home’ and ‘an area for considerable investment’.
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C-suite shake-up
The moves come months after CEO Noel Quinn unexpectedly announced he would be stepping down after an ‘intense’ five years in charge. The bank’s current CFO Georges Elhedery took the reins on 2 September.
On a global level, the investment in HSBC’s wealth division has allowed the private bank to open new operations onshore in six Chinese cities, the UAE, Mexico, India and Thailand over the last ‘three or four years’.
[See also: The UK’s best private banks: the exclusive institutions UHNWs trust with their money]
Regaining the top spot
‘In the wealth business, we’ve really enhanced our proposition in almost every market,’ Spring said in an exclusive interview with Spear’s in August. Headcount in the bank’s private banking and wealth division has increased by 40 per cent since Spring became CEO in September 2020.
HSBC was once Asia’s biggest wealth manager but was overtaken when UBS increased its assets under management to $645 billion after its acquisition of Credit Suisse in 2023. (HSBC has $607 billion AUM in Asia.) Spring told Spear’s the bank were seeking to regain the top spot.
HSBC posted a $21.6 billion pre-tax profit for the first half of the year, which was in line with the previous year’s figure.
