Hong Kong

Ex-Citibanker Simon Loong is playing a long game – he has assembled some powerful backers for his Hong Kong fintech and now, armed with a new virtual banking licence, he wants WeLab to take on the territory’s established banking incumbents.

Hong Kong’s belated embrace of diversity has meant a dozen of its banks are now run by women, but there’s clearly more work to be done.

When super-typhoon Mangkhut roared through Hong Kong in the middle of last September, the most intense such weather vent to strike the territory since records began 73 years ago, it devastated the MacLehose Trail, the much-loved track that traverses 100 kilometres across Hong Kong’s New Territories.

With its nifty ‘SC Keyboard’ application, Standard Chartered Hong Kong has solved those tricky problems many of us have when dining out with friends – the embarrassing lack of actual cash for the bill.

Angel Ng’s nimble Citi Hong Kong operation was busy – and profitable – in 2018, her first year in charge as chief executive, thanks in large part to Chris Laskowski’s investment banking division.

Hang Seng Bank’s chief executive, Louisa Cheang, has just come through her second year of running Hong Kong’s quintessential grassroots bank, and things seem to be going swimmingly for the former head of retail banking at HSBC. Small and medium-sized enterprises are Hang Seng’s core business, particularly the aspiring stallholders, traders and shopkeepers that line Hong Kong’s teeming streets. As they – and Hong Kong – have grown bigger and richer, Hang Seng has helped them along that prosperous journey to China and beyond – and this last year was no exception.

In Hong Kong’s buoyant, brand-conscious private-banking sector, inevitably it’s a tussle between the Swiss: Credit Suisse and UBS. UBS has the bigger operation, with nearly double the headcount of relationship managers, according to industry data – or 1,138 at UBS versus 586 at Credit Suisse – in the Asia-Pacific region.

Such was HSBC’s supremacy across Hong Kong’s investment banking sector that some of its competitors for our awards left the bank off their self-promoting submission tables, arguing (unconvincingly) that HSBC was a local bank and thus doesn’t qualify in Hong Kong’s international capital markets.