BDO Private Bank’s 20th year seems an ideal moment to take stock of what president Albert Yeo’s institution started in the Philippines.
In 2003, BDO became the first full-service private bank in southeast Asia’s sixth-biggest economy. Since then, the wealth management field that has grown around BDO has become crowded, increasingly competitive and global in scale and outlook.
Through it all, BDO Private Bank has done an impressive job of retaining its pioneering instincts – and carving out a market-leading role in at least three areas: discretionary portfolio management solutions; digitalizing services and products; and helping to prove that the Philippines’ family office space is among the region’s most promising. For this legacy, and its nimble efforts to innovate, BDO wins the Asiamoney awards in all three disciplines.
The timeline of BDO’s evolution in private banking in many ways tracks the country’s own embrace of customized wealth management. In 2006, for example, BDO launched its Bespoke Trust Structures for Estate Planning business, offering solutions to succession planning and wealth transfer. A year later, it became the first private bank to offer an open architecture platform for domestic investment products.
In 2008, BDO helped to create a national blueprint for expansion, opening customer service centres in Cebu and Alabang, the first ones outside of Manila. A year later, it looked overseas, broadening offerings of fixed income products to cover global investments, giving clients entirely new opportunities for portfolio diversification. In the years that followed, BDO steadily expanded its equity and funds platform to include global investments, giving clients unrivalled options to find alpha, or benchmark-beating opportunities.
The bank has not looked back since. By the end of November 2022, BDO Private Bank had 8,723 clients, with average client assets under management of P49 million ($887,000). It had total AUM of P662.2 billion, up about 3% year on year, and revenues of P1.2 billion, almost 30% higher, year on year.
BDO’s plan is to lure more entrepreneurs and heads of family corporations into its client roster, and those at different phases of life, whether that is wealth accumulation and growth, wealth preservation and consolidation, retirement or the next-gen crowd.
It plans to emphasize offshore investment products, promote new estate-planning solutions and continue its track record on digitalizing all aspects of its operations. BDO is ramping up the range of exclusive in-person and web-based events about the economy and investment strategies, and a broader range of lifestyle topics of interest to clients and wealthy families.
BDO also wants to continue its annual increases in investment on information technology and digital banking, both to improve service and accessibility for customers and to disrupt its own inner functions.