Asiamoney China Private Banking Awards

As ever in this country, the numbers are extraordinary – whether it’s rate of growth or just the overall total. But Asiamoney has identified China’s best banks in 2018 to help high net-worth individuals with planning, diversification and wealth transfer

In recent years, China Construction Bank has made a consistent effort to deploy digitization and data analysis in private banking and wealth management to upgrade internal management processes and attract customers, which partly explains how the bank’s private banking division achieved such robust business growth last year.

Family offices are a fairly new territory in China’s private banking sector. China Minsheng Bank is one of the first to open family offices for ultra-high net-worth clients. Its deputy general manager is Li Wen.

With 215 private banking and wealth management centres operating across China and a team of nearly 2,000 professional managers, Agricultural Bank of China has developed a large wealth-management product portfolio for its high net-worth customers.

While continuing to expand its international private banking service network, Bank of China has made remarkable progress recently in rolling out new products and maximizing opportunities for its high net-worth clients to allocate assets around the world.

Bank of China opened private banking service centres at its Shanghai and Beijing branches in 2007. Operating in more than 40 countries and overseas regions, BoC has also built an extensive business network outside mainland China, which has enabled its private banking division to quickly expand its global footprint.

China didn’t allow private businesses until the early 1980s. As a result, the majority of private businesses are still in the hands of their founders and the concept of transferring wealth to the next generation is still fairly new to business owners.

Bank of Beijing was incorporated in the Chinese capital of Beijing in 1996. Since then, it has opened branches in 12 large Chinese cities, most of which are in northern and coastal China regions. It leads regional banks in the country in the provision of private banking services and continues to outperform its peers in product development and customer base expansion.

Citic Bank was one of the first Chinese banks to offer private banking services in China. It outperformed other domestic national commercial banks in growing its private banking customer base and assets under management in 2017 by upgrading its marketing and sales capability and developing new products.