China’s wealthy flock to Hong Kong for global investments, banker says

An increasing number of wealthy customers from mainland China are using Hong Kong to diversify their investments and expand their businesses globally, according to a senior executive of Hong Kong-based mid-tier lender China Citic Bank International.

“After many government efforts to promote family offices in recent years, we have seen strong growth from wealthy mainland customers seeking our bankers to help them set up family offices in Hong Kong,” said Wendy Yuen Miu-ling, head of the bank’s personal and business banking group, in an exclusive interview.

She said the bank, which uses the name CNCBI for short, had seen new cross-border wealth-management customers from the mainland triple in the first half of this year, while assets under management jumped 30 per cent.

The growth of the wealth-management business helped boost the bank’s fee income by 50 per cent in the first half, while its private bank operating income increased by 60 per cent, Yuen said.

Rich mainland clients liked to set up family offices in Hong Kong “as a platform for them to diversify their investment portfolio”, she said, adding that as an international financial centre, the city offered them a wide range of international products to invest in.

Family offices are entities created by affluent individuals or families to manage their investments, succession planning and philanthropic activities.

In his policy address in September, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu set a new target of attracting an additional 220 family offices to Hong Kong by 2028, after achieving the previous goal of bringing in 200 such firms between 2023 and 2025. This followed tax incentives introduced in 2023 and the investment-migration scheme launched last year.