Asia-Pacific headhunters are refocusing their efforts on the private banking and wealth management sectors, with areas such as compliance proving a hot-spot.

Financial industry headhunters in the Asia-Pacific are re-focusing on the private banking and wealth management sectors as traditional areas, such as investment and corporate banking, continue to struggle in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Tim Tsang, who works with global executive search firm Tardis Group in Sydney, confirmed that he had focused his efforts on the Asian private banking sector, and discovered a sweet spot in “legal and compliance.”

“It proved to be a good move for me and I turned around a good number of deals in a short time,” he told WealthBriefingAsia.

“When the pipeline in investment and corporate banking was quite low I found that private banks were hiring regardless,” he continued.

“There was demand there still and a lot of new private banks were coming into the region, and a lot of existing private banks – especially European – were ramping up operations,” he said.

Mr Tsang has received continued mandates from European, and often Swiss, private banks which have had long-standing operations in the region but which are in a growth phase.

“A lot of banks have been merging, a lot have been acquired, and it was messy but many of them saw it as an opportunity to pick up people,” he said.

Singapore continues to be the epicentre of private banking recruitment, said Mr Tsang, as Hong Kong in particular becomes a regional office and a service centre or staging post to China.

His comments are backed up by another regional headhunter, who claims his small practice has been largely sustained in the last two years by Singapore’s appetite for private banking.

“Relationship managers have become my specialty, and I’ve put quite a few of them into private banks in Singapore,” the headhunter, who asked not to be named, said.

“With the rest of the market in the doldrums, its helped to keep me afloat.  To be honest, things would have been pretty grim otherwise,” the headhunter said.

Tardis Group’s Tim Tsang agrees that “every private bank in Asia” is looking for relationship managers, but have a preference for people with local experience.

“The private banks want working knowledge, they don’t want the expensive guys who are parachuted in from offshore,” he said.

“What they want are local people with local relationships and people who know the local area and the drill,” he said.

The most fertile field for hiring, Mr Tsang said, are other foreign banks in Asia, not necessarily the private banking operations of home-grown banks.

“Some of the local shops have a local mindset, and the ideal source of candidates is basically competitors because you hire these people, plug them in and they are they are able to start playing straight away,” Mr Tsang said.

“Every now and then you can get them from the local banks but their culture and mindset is often very different, so it doesn’t necessarily work as well,” he continued.

He also observed a specialisation for relationship managers along lines of nationality. He sees Indian relationship managers servicing Indian clients, Chinese with Chinese, and a trend for relationship managers from a western cultural background to service western clients.

“Its really getting quite specialised now, and that is the reality,” he added.