Security Bank has successfully picked its spot in the Philippine private banking industry.
With Binky Mirabueno, head of wealth management, and Leslie Cham, head of branch banking, at the helm, Security Bank’s wealth arm has positioned itself below the standard private banking businesses of larger local banks and leading foreign institutions. Security Bank’s minimum trust relationship balance is a below-average P5 million (about $90,500).
In other words, Security Bank takes the idea of mass affluence more seriously than most peers. The plan is to serve customers who find themselves in segment gaps – neglected by private banks with an eye on the much bigger fish – and serve them well.
As of September 2022, the firm’s wealth management unit had shown a 27% increase in assets under management year on year, to P204.4 billion. Its customer base rose 10%, year on year, to roughly 1.72 million: 24% of these were mass affluent clients.
This performance is no aberration. During the five-year period from 2017 to the end of September 2022, the private bank’s AUM and customer base rose 44% and 40% respectively, on a compound annual growth rate basis.
Technological disruption is a big part of the overall strategy. Security Bank constantly provides better, faster and safer digital access for clients for their portfolios and review services.
Although face-to-face meetings are always an option, Security Bank is a study in how to wean customers off interactions which are traditionally held in-person, requiring time-consuming and productivity-killing forays into Manila’s notoriously snarled traffic. The bank’s pioneering SMS/text channels increasingly free up relationship managers to interact with many accounts in a day, sometimes simultaneously.
Client surveys find that rather than feeling short-changed, high net-worth customers are embracing the convenience and immediacy of access to market information, regular portfolio updates, macroeconomic views and big-picture strategy interactions through SMS and texts.
Security Bank gives each customer personalized digital cards to identify them as VIPs. When showing these cards at any branch in the nation, private bank customers are given priority access to the range of premium services.
This can span the broader bank's extensive branch network and its markets and treasury segments, the latter being a rich source of investment product solutions for wealthy customers.
Popular products include unit investment trust funds, long-term negotiable certificates of deposit, the Philippine government’s retail treasury bonds and bonds sold by large corporations.
Access to Security Bank’s Trust and Asset Management Group can provide clients with a complete line of investment products and trust solutions, offering investments that often beat the benchmark, while subsidiary SB Capital can help clients to raise funding from the debt capital markets.