Wall Street Journal
Asia push
Citigroup plans to recruit “1,100 private bankers and relationship managers as well as 1,200 technical and operational staffers in Hong Kong and Singapore, as part of a plan to grow assets under management for clients in Asia to $450 billion by 2025. That represents a 50% increase from the roughly $300 billion that Citigroup currently manages for wealthy people in Asia. Achieving the new target won’t be easy; Citigroup’s assets under management for such clients grew just 18% from $255 billion in 2015. Other global banks, including JPMorgan and HSBC Holdings PLC, are also trying to get a bigger share of the same market, particularly in China.”
Last week Citi said it plans to “shed most of its consumer banking operations across Asia while scaling up what it sees as a more-lucrative endeavor: serving the rising number of wealthy entrepreneurs and their businesses in the region.”
Financial Times
Over?
“The easy money in residential mortgage banking has probably already been made,” an FT op-ed says. “The share prices of listed mortgage bankers still reflect the post-pandemic recovery, not the more recent slowdown. Maybe equity investors will be proven right about the long-term value of these shares. But a lot of stars will have to align for that to come true.”
First come, first served
HSBC Chief Executive Noel Quinn “has abolished the entire executive floor of its Canary Wharf skyscraper in east London, as the bank becomes the latest to drive through sweeping changes to post-pandemic working practices. Top managers have been booted out of their 42nd-floor private offices, which have been turned into client meeting rooms and collaborative spaces. Executives — the CEO included — now hot desk on an open-plan floor two stories below.”
“Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world. That was a waste of real estate,” Quinn told the FT. “We don’t have a designated desk. You turn up and grab one in the morning.”
Zero tolerance
More than two dozen large international banks, including Goldman Sachs and HSBC, “are coming under pressure from a coalition of large investors to stop financing carbon-intensive projects and to scale up their green lending. The group of 35 big investors managing $11 trillion in assets have called on the banks to align their financing with a goal of net zero emissions and to ensure that executive pay is linked to this target. The move is the latest sign that investors’ climate focus is shifting from big carbon emitters, such as oil and gas groups, to those providing the finance for carbon-intensive projects.”
“The problem we face today is that too many banks are failing to consider climate harm when they make financing decisions, and too much money is being ploughed into carbon-intensive activities that we so desperately need to move away from,” said Natasha Landell-Mills, head of stewardship at U.K. asset manager Sarasin & Partners.
ABN Amro settlement
ABN Amro “has reached a €480 million settlement with Dutch prosecutors over anti-money laundering failings.” The action “also triggered the resignation” the CEO of Denmark’s Danske Bank, one of “three former ABN Amro board members who have been identified as suspects” in the investigation. Danske Bank was embroiled in its own money laundering scandal several years ago.
New York Times
Reunited
Jake Siewert, who “for nearly a decade led Goldman Sachs’s post-crisis efforts to shed its image as one of Wall Street’s most mysterious, and maligned, money machines,” is leaving the bank to “to effectively become a political and policy adviser” at Warburg Pincus. “The role — which will take him away from P.R. and see him working for both the firm and its portfolio companies — reunites him with former Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, who has been Warburg’s president since 2014.”
At Goldman “his primary task was erasing Goldman’s reputation as a ‘great vampire squid.’ That meant demystifying the firm, putting its executives more in the public eye and repairing relationships with policymakers and the media. Mr. Siewert helped push Goldman into podcasting and social media at a time when neither was common practice at a Wall Street bank. More recently, he was involved in the launch of Marcus, the online retail banking division that has become a key source of growth for the firm. Surveys suggest that Goldman’s public reputation has improved markedly since the financial crisis.”
Crypto war
“A new front in the war over how cryptocurrency will — or will not — be regulated” has opened up. And the battle lines are just beginning to be drawn,” the Times reports. “Players, observers, lobbyists and the lobbied alike consider this a critical moment for crypto and its influencers. Succeeding or failing to persuade officials now will determine whether regulation allows the digital gold rush to accelerate or slows it to a sputter.”
Leaning left?
The “proudly politically independent” Federal Reserve is “facing criticism as it wades into climate and equity issues.” Republican lawmakers “say it risks veering out of its lane as it focuses on what they portray as social priorities. Fed officials have ramped up their attention to climate change risks, racial economic equity and labor market inclusion, issues that many economists say are critical to the nation’s future, but which Washington often treats as the purview of the partisan left.”
Elsewhere
Credit Suisse sued
A small U.S. pension fund “filed a lawsuit against Credit Suisse on Friday, accusing the Swiss bank of misleading investors and mismanaging risk exposure to high-risk clients, including Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital Management,” Reuters reported. “The pension fund, City of St. Clair Shores Police & Fire Retirement System, based in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, filed the class action lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, alleging violations of federal securities laws.”
Quotable
“We will have a very different working style going forward that will be much more hybrid, where colleagues can part work in the office, part at home. I won’t be in the office five days a week. I think it’s unnecessary. ... It’s the new reality of life.” — HSBC Chief Executive Noel Quinn, who said the bank’s top executives at its London headquarters — including himself — won’t have their own private offices and will share desks.
