Investor sentiment, however, remains weak, with 10 to 20% shift of total assets under management to cash and equivalent deposits, Nick Pollard, RBS Coutts’ Asia chief executive said at the Reuters Private Banking Summit.
Nick Pollard, chief executive of RBS Coutts Bank, said he will replace all the 70 bankers who quit in its Singapore office last week, taking hiring targets up to 270 people over the next four years.
“We have a five-year plan for adding 200 new people in Asia and doubling assets under management — which are currently at $16.7 billion — and that’s still the plan. And [the hiring target figure] is a bit more than that now, because everyone who’s left will be replaced,” Pollard told AsianInvestor.com in an interview.
Private bank RBS Coutts said today its clients have so far not withdrawn assets from its Singapore office as a result of large resignations and it will aim to make sure that outflows are minimal.
“None of these bankers have started anywhere new so nothing has left the bank,” Nick Pollard, Asia chief executive of the wealth manager, told Thomson Reuters in a phone interview.
In the private banking industry, clients typically tend to move their assets with the bankers who serve them.
“Clearly my job is to make sure the amount that leaves is as small as possible.”
He said RBS Coutts, part of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS.L), is getting help from other centres within the bank to serve its Asian clients, as a result of over 70 people, or more than a quarter of the staff at the Singapore office, quitting.
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