HSBC Private Banking’s regional head of funds and ETFs retires
Virginia Devereux Wong, long-standing regional head of funds and ETFs at HSBC Private Banking will leave the firm this month. Lina Lim will take on a new expanded role a regional head of discretionary and funds, Asia Pacific, effective from 28 June 2021, overseeing discretionary, funds and ETFs in the region. Lim has over 23 years of industry experience primarily in asset and wealth management. She led the managed solutions at JP Morgan Wealth Management in Asia prior to joining HSBC Private Banking as the regional head of discretionary business.
Amundi hire ESG specialist
Amundi has appointed of Kristy Wong as associate director, ESG investment specialist in Hong Kong, responsible for promoting ESG practice and Amundi’s responsible investing solutions.
Wong has 12 years of experience in ESG advisory across the public and financial sectors in Hong Kong. Prior to joining Amundi, she was vice president, ESG at Bank of America in Hong Kong from 2018 where she was the Asia Pacific environment lead. Before this, Wong gained experience in ESG advisory at Ernst & Young and the Hong Kong Productivity Council.
Credit Suisse boosts Indonesia private banking unit
Malcolm Tay joins Credit Suisse in a newly created role as deputy market group head and market leader for Indonesia, starting on 1 September 1 this year.
Tay joins from Deutsche Bank Wealth Management where he spent 18 years, most recently as group head for Southeast Asia. He has 30 years of wealth management experience having previously worked with Merrill Lynch as a client relationship manager and Citi Private Bank as co-head of Indonesia onshore for ten years.
This year, Credit Suisse appointed Tammy Tam as team leader for the Thailand and Vietnam market, and promoted Dominique Boer as market group head Singapore.
Gam expands disruptive growth team
Gam Investments appointed Wendy Chen as a senior investment analyst and Pieran Maru as an investment analyst on the Disruptive Growth team led by Mark Hawtin.
Chen will join Gam in August from Welight Capital, a family office for one of the founding partners of Tencent, where she was an investment analyst covering the global internet sector, which she will also cover at Gam. She also spent five years as an associate at Goldman Sachs, where she was focused on China online entertainment equity research. Chen is based in Hong Kong.
Marua joins the team from Gam’s compliance function, where he has spent the last five years. He will cover both software and hardware names for Gam strategies. These appointments coincide with Amanda Lyons leaving the business to pursue another opportunity.
Gam also hires in Singapore
Separately, Gam has added to its Singapore team with the appointment of Nicholas Tan as associate director. Tan is based in Singapore and will report to Terence Bong, head of Singapore. In this new role, Nicholas will be responsible for business development and client relationships in Singapore and the Southeast Asia region. His appointment will further expand GAM’s local presence and shortly follows the appointment of Terence Bong and the opening of a Singapore office.
Tan joins Gam from Capital International, where he spent three years as part of the business development team, with a focus on financial intermediaries in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Prior to that, Nicholas was an intermediary business development associate at Nikko Asset Management Asia, where he was responsible for servicing private banks. He began his career in 2012 at multiasset family office, Dawe Holdings.
VanEck bolsters Asia team
VanEck is ramping up its Asia focus and has appointed Jonathan Thong as vice president for business development within the Asia ex-China sales team.
His remit focuses on promoting VanEck’s capabilities to intermediary and institutional clients in the region, and he reports to Matthew McKinnon, head of business development for Asia. Thong joins a team led by Arian Neiron, CEO and Managing Director of Asia Pacific, who founded VanEck Australia and oversees the company’s Asia Pacific business.
Prior to joining VanEck, Thong worked at HSBC’s private banking arm, where he was a global equity trader for the past five years. Before HSBC, he spent six years on the sell-side, focusing on institutional equity sales trading in OCBC Securities and Maybank Kim Eng.
Other existing members of the business development team, including Nicholas Jackson, will continue with their client coverage for the Asia Pacific region and promote the company’s active and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) across all client channels.
Aviva Investors expands emerging market debt (EMD) team
Amy Kam has been appointed as senior portfolio manager, responsible for co-managing Aviva Investors emerging market (EM) corporate bond strategy, alongside Aaron Grehan, head of hard Currency EMD. Kam has over a decade of experience of investing in EM corporate debt and previously worked at Gam as an investment manager.
Other recent hires in the EM debt team include Nafez Zouk who joined as an EM sovereign analyst in a newly created role. Zouk has over 10 years of experience and will largely focus on sovereign issuers that are active in both local and hard currency markets. He previously worked for Oxford Economics as an EM strategist.
Aleksej Gren has also been appointed as an EM Corporate Analyst in another newly-created role. He will be responsible for the analysis of EM corporate debt issuers with a focus on the metals & mining, consumer, infrastructure and real estate sectors. Gren joined Aviva Investors in September 2020, having worked as a credit analyst for over eight years on both the buy and sell side.
