From the press release desk this week…
People moves
Matthews Asia has appointed Lindsay Wright as Hong Kong-based head of Asia and global chief operating officer. In this newly-created role, Wright will be responsible for overseeing the firm’s business activities and operations in Asia. Before she assumed her new role, she was previously BNY Mellon’s co-head of investment management and head of distribution for Asia-Pacific. Wright joined BNY Mellon in 2016 from Invesco, where she was head of regional institutional sales…
Man Group has appointed Ethan Kang as managing director and head of Korea. Based in Seoul, Kang will be responsible for the firm’s business development and strategy in the South Korean market. Reporting to Hersh Gandhi, managing director for Asia-Pacific, Kang will focus on building institutional client relationships in South Korea. Before Man investments, he was an executive director for institutional sales at JP Morgan Asset Management…
Prestige Fund, which specialises in direct lending strategies in the UK, has appointed Rassul Azizi as credit director. Before joining Prestige, Azizi worked at EFG Private Bank in the UK, where he was part of the bank’s credit approval team, structuring credit-based solutions and analysing credit requests. Founded in 2007, Prestige has raised at least $1.5bn for its lending strategies…
Deutsche Bank Wealth Management has appointed Aditya Mishra to lead the firm’s London-based global South Asia (GSA) team. He will report functionally to Amrit Singh, head of wealth management coverage for GSA and locally to Michael Morley, CEO of Deutsche Bank UK. Before Deutsche Bank Wealth, Mishra was at Credit Suisse Private Banking, where he worked for at least eight years across the UK and in India…
China
East Capital has launched a Ucits version of its China A-shares strategy. The strategy already had a Luxembourg-based Sicav-SIF, which is only available for qualified investors in Finland and Sweden. The Ucits fund is now pending registration in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK. The fund will also be available in Asia, but only to qualified investors and not for retail sale…
Qualified Domestic Limited Partnership (QDLP) access, which allows foreign managers to invest onshore Chinese money offshore, is the main reason for asset management firms to establish wholly-foreign owned enterprise (WFOE) structures in China, argues Z-Ben Advisors in a report. “Unsurprisingly, there’s a heavy tilt favouring the QDLP group,” it said. The report also described Schroders and Invesco as “outliers”, as both firms have successful joint ventures onshore but still chose to establish a private fund WFOE platform…
Source: Z-Ben Advisors
Asia wealth
Asia saw the largest growth rate in terms of UHNWI population and wealth in 2017 and now accounts for 27% of total wealth, according to a Wealth-X report. In terms of countries, Japan, China and Hong Kong are among the top 10 UHNW countries by UHNW population…
Top 10 countries
Source: Wealth-X
Enforcement
The Court of Final Appeal has dismissed the appeal of Moody’s Investors Service in relation to the Securities and Futures Commission’s (SFC) disciplinary action concerning a special comment report Moody’s published in 2011. This brings to an end Moody’s challenge to the SFC’s disciplinary action. The Court of Final Appeal will deliver reasons for its decision, according to a statement from the SFC…
The Monetary Authority of Singapore has released a consultation paper proposing requirements for financial firms in the Lion City to implement cyber security measures to protect their IT systems. These measures include addressing system security flaws in a timely manner, installing anti-virus software to mitigate the risk of malware infection and strengthening user authentication for system administrator accounts on critical systems. The public consultation will run until 5 October…
