Bank of Singapore’s portfolio management and research office had a day of reckoning in early 2020 when the Covid-19 crisis escalated into a pandemic and Singapore went into lockdown mode.
The team, led by Jean Chia, took a hard look at the role of research and portfolio management at a time when travel and face-to-face meetings with clients were all but banned. The division had to look at endogenous factors, such as macroeconomic data or company valuations, and put those into the context of exogenous factors relating to developments in the real world, such as vaccine progress or geopolitics.
The end result was a research team at Bank of Singapore that put extra emphasis on the following: being vocal in informing and educating its private banking clients at a time of volatility; becoming more tactical and agile in incorporating new variables in its analyses; and embracing the fundamental principles of environmental, social and governance factors.
Chia, who took over the team in November 2019, stresses that Bank of Singapore’s research work in the past year was not all down to one person.