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Standard Chartered has helped clients with their money across its 170 year history, not only in its home market, but across the world. How does Standard Chartered maintain its reputation as a global, and local, bank?
Demir Avigdor, managing director, head of private banking UK, Standard Chartered, believes wealth is growing, not only in volume, but geographically. The wealthy are spreading their funds across the world and the bank needs to meet them where they are needed.
PBI: What is Standard Chartered’s mission statement? You’re based in London but with a heavily international client base? What is the defining aspect of Standard Chartered?
Demir Avigdor: We’re a leading international wealth manager, with a world-class, diversified wealth management and cross-border banking proposition that serves the needs of affluent clients. We all know that we're witnessing the most profound distribution of wealth, not only inter-generationally, but also across geographies.
The emerging markets, from predominantly Asia, Africa, Middle East, are growing much faster than in the West. The global wealth is shifting to those markets. With a presence in global wealth hubs (Hong Kong, Singapore, UAE, Jersey), we are perfectly positioned to capture growing wealth flows across our network. We are connecting our clients, either with each other or within the markets, or with our Corporate and Investment Banking arm, to meet their financial growth needs.
Why are people shifting to hubs like the Middle East and Africa?
The key answer here is that the emerging markets are growing much faster than the West. A recent report from the European Union showed that, in 1980 EU countries contributed 31% of the global GDP; and the US contributed 25%. Fast forward forty-five years and we note that the US portion is still 25%, but Europe's portion is substantially reduced to 16%. So, where did the difference go? The portion of wealth being generated in Asia, Middle East and Africa is much bigger today in comparison.
There is far more wealth being created in Asia now; it is a major player in wealth generation. There is a flourishing generation of innovative entrepreneurs, especially in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Dubai has emerged successfully after the Covid-19 pandemic and the financial markets are registering record growth in the last two years.
Africa is growing fast. I appreciate it is coming from a very low base, but when you look at the growth rates, the African growth rate is much faster than the growth rates in the West.
Our strategy here is to really focus on those markets, to connect our clients across our regions in Africa, Middle East and Asia. To facilitate this, we organise a number of annual events for our Family Office clients. These are not typical Family Office seminars, but akin to networking events to connect global families with like-minded families in other geographies.