Far from biding its time until ex-CEO Boris Collardi resurfaces as Pictet’s newest partner, Bank Julius Baer has just upped the ante in Asia.
By Shruti Advani, Guest Contributor finews.asia
Julius Baer has significantly bolstered its China team with the addition of Vicki Lee who was most recently team head of the China market at UBS wealth management, a source familiar with the move told finews.asia.
Lee has over twenty years of wealth management experience and will continue to be based in Hong Kong in her new role although her focus will be exclusively on greater China clients. She will report to David Shick, head private banking greater China.
New Platform
Just as UBS did in 2017, Julius Baer has also replaced its legacy core banking system with Temenos T24 in Singapore and Hong Kong in the hope that it will allow the bank to better adapt to changing client and market needs. A revenue uptick may well follow – Temenos claims its core banking clients have a 36 percent higher return on equity than banks using legacy systems.
However, not all private banks have been able to ensure smooth platform migrations and industry observers may well remember the case of a large bank whose systems were down during market hours while it migrated to a new platform.
When Markets Are Closed
«Clients were livid,» said one Hong Kong-based banker who spent an excruciating amount of time on the phone trying to explain to clients and colleagues why they could not log on. «The decision to migrate was a good one but the execution was flawed,» she sums up. Aside from the expected resistance to navigating a new platform, the migration exercise at Julius Baer appears to have had better luck.
«Platform migrations share similar challenges in Asia as in other markets, of which one of the most critical one is to perform the cut-over activities within a short time frame when markets are closed,» says Nic Dreckmann, chief operating officer and member of the executive board.
New Office
«In Asia, we purposely chose the Easter holiday period (March 31 – April 1, 2018) and asked over 900 colleagues globally from front, middle and back offices as well as other business functions to be involved in executing the migration activities which were performed successfully,» Dreckmann added.
Rounding up the trifecta of changes is the new office on the 28th floor of Marina One in Singapore’s central business district, a recently completed building that was voted 'the most instagrammable place' in the city state, as finews.asia reported earlier.
Tough Fight to Pictet
At 100,000 square feet the new premises are considerably larger than the 70, 000 square feet the bank currently utilizes. Private banking, wealth planning, investment solutions, markets and trading teams will come under one roof when staff move into the new office at the end of the month.
In Asia, Julius Baer is spearheaded by Jimmy Lee, a Credit Suisse alumnus who forged a friendship with Collardi when both overlapped at the Swiss bank in 1999. Despite their friendship, Lee seems determined to put up a tough fight to Pictet – or any other bank – eyeing its turf.
