Narit Kosalathip’s 26 years at Kiatnakin Phatra Securities have been interesting. The head of its wealth management unit started his career there in 1995. Since then, he has experienced an Asian financial crisis, a dot-com crash, a global market meltdown, several chaotic changes in government and now a pandemic slamming Thailand.
In that time, Kiatnakin Phatra Wealth Management has become the go-to place in Thailand for managing, protecting and, most importantly, growing wealth.
It sure helps to be part of a broader financial power that is an industry leader in brokerage, market dealing, underwriting, securities borrowing and lending, investment advisory and private fund management.
Kiatnakin Phatra Global Investing, for example, gives clients access to well over 8,000 stocks with market capitalization exceeding $25 trillion, from the biggest exchanges from the US to Hong Kong to Singapore. This presents diversification options hard to match in Thailand – and online accessibility and speed to boot. Clients also have access to Bank of America’s global research to augment views in Bangkok.
Such research assets proved invaluable in the last 18 months of market uncertainty. Thanks to a research agreement with BofA Securities, Kiatnakin Phatra’s analysts produced out-of-the-box takes on the Thai economy and politics, as well as Thai-listed securities, serving its asset managers well.
That generated ideas for investment decisions for all three of Kiatnakin Phatra’s strategy pillars: fundamental progress, or how a company's future fundamentals look; valuations or whether a stock seems fairly, under-, or overvalued; and management revisions, or assessing potential impact and achievability of a company's guidance together with general market expectations.
Another Kiatnakin Phatra Wealth Management proposition: it’s the only sizable private bank in Thailand to grow out of a securities house. That gives it quite the leg up versus peers in areas from investment advisory, product offerings and trading capacities, and discretionary portfolio management.
Most competitors grew out of commercial banks. This gives Narit’s team a winning attribute: Kiatnakin Phatra, by nature of its roots, offers clients greater options to invest in private debt. So do the firm’s ambitions to help make Thailand, by growing its own skills and national footprint, the top market for wealth management in southeast Asia outside Singapore.