Wealth in Asia-Pacific is growing faster than in other world regions, underpinning an extended period of expansion and innovation in the region’s wealth centers. Hong Kong, for example, is projected by Bloomberg to be a larger center for cross-border wealth management than Switzerland by 2030, boosted by money flowing from mainland China and a resurgence of family offices.¹

Across the region, the growing number of mass affluent investors is also proving a key factor, prompting a wave of technology-driven wealth management innovation that will also drive change in wealthier segments – particularly as wealth begins to transfer across the generations to digitally-savvy HNW and UHNW clients. 

Rapid technological advances and changing client attitudes mean that wealth managers do not have the luxury of sitting still. Read on to explore five key trends that will shape the Asia-Pacific wealth management market through 2025 and beyond. 

Work continues across the wealth management industry and capital markets on a multitude of AI/GenAI use cases, with the most high-profile concerning the deployment of tools and interfaces in client support and personalization initiatives. Through 2025 we are likely to see further progress on two fronts in particular: 

• Client-facing copilots deliver personal investment research in real time. AI/GenAI is already being used by select firms to power client copilots that help them identify the most promising investment areas and assets, using financial analysis. For example, the client might want to identify the top publicly-listed firms in a particular industry, understand their risk and reward profiles when combined in one investment portfolio, and then evaluate various investment scenarios – instantaneously and dynamically. 
• Easing the customer journey and supporting relationship managers (RMs). AI tools are also being used to improve the customer experience by answering simple client requests, e.g. for account updates and portfolio monitoring. This in turn helps advisors and RMs to focus on more complex and value-added matters such as crafting investment strategies, understanding the client’s financial aspirations, and sophisticated portfolio construction. GenAI will also increasingly support RMs as they fulfill these complex tasks by supplying ideas and recommendations for the RM to validate, adjust and communicate to the client. 

The technology firms developing market-leading tools to improve the client experience will increasingly white-label these tools for other wealth managers. The key to successfully deploying both third-party white-label and in-house tools will be striking the right balance between high touch and high tech for each target client segment, while also building robust governance and monitoring frameworks, e.g. to minimize and risk manage GenAI hallucinations. 

Capco’s recent surveys in Hong Kong and Singapore indicate that most clients – around three-quarters in Hong Kong, for example – are happy to allow AI to guide wealth management decisions.²  Through 2025, firms should work to embed (Gen)AI approaches across the firm in ways that will preserve this trust by applying appropriate governance frameworks, educating stakeholders, and leveraging the most appropriate AI partnerships.

In the near term, most wealth managers around the world will treat GenAI as complementary to the role of the RM rather than substitutive. This may be particularly true in the Asia-Pacific region, given the rising demand for wealth management services, with the market projected to grow at a CAGR of 8.12% between 2025 and 2030.³

Hiring RMs is regarded by many firms as the best way to attract large tranches of new business, to establish and maintain client trust, and to deal with complex and sensitive client issues. In line with this, leading institutions are continuing to invest in hiring and training programs and in modern flagship offices in the key wealth management centers. 

As the year progresses, this kind of investment in the ‘physical’ world may begin to look like something of a contradiction, given rising investment in digital channels and AI-driven digital solutions. However, wealth managers need to remain visible and to deepen personal relationships with key clientele – reinforcing emerging digital strengths with the social interaction that is so enduringly powerful in higher-end wealth management. 

The key challenge is how to create an environment where the client wants to engage – whether in a physical or digital space – while meshing physical and digital experiences in a more seamless way. Improving the integration of channels and client communications will be a key focus for firms over the next year. 

Over time, the RM’s role will shift towards higher-value activities, as AI-enabled automation accomplishes a growing roster of simpler tasks, and the RM’s role as the trusted human-in-the loop between the client and advanced AI tools becomes a natural part of the wealth management process. Through 2025, firms should therefore begin to ask themselves not whether to continue investing in RMs and client experiences, but how and where to invest in them whilst being conscious of broader technological trends. 

The goal should be to make sure RMs have all the new skills, physical spaces, integrated technologies and infrastructure support they need to compete as the relative value of various wealth management services and activities begins to shift.

The wealth management market in the Asia-Pacific region is changing in terms of the types of clients that ambitious wealth managers need to attract and accommodate. 

We can see this across several dimensions including a greater flow of offshore clients and wealth into centers such as Singapore (from Thailand, India and elsewhere), the rising importance of Chinese mainland investors in Hong Kong, the ongoing transfer of wealth to a younger generation in all the region’s wealth centers, the growing importance of segments transitioning between affluent and HNW, and a more proactive attitude among some HNW segments in terms of selecting investment strategies.  

This greater client and behavioral diversity has many implications in terms of the services and investment capabilities that wealth managers offer and the shape of key processes such as onboarding. For example, clients may speak a greater range of languages, have different perceptions about the most attractive asset classes, and different needs in terms of tax and legal advice.
The key word here is flexibility. Wealth managers need to ensure that it is easy to shape offerings and services around the needs of different clients and segments. 

Through 2025, wealth managers may want to consider their operating model and key processes through this lens, asking for example: 

• Do we have the right onboarding procedures to cope with clients from new jurisdictions? 
• Are we set up to offer the right ongoing servicing to our new and target offshore wealth segments? 
• Are we offering the right investment product proposition to attract new segments including younger investors and those transitioning to the HNW segment? 

Product evolution is an increasingly important driver. Wealth managers need to be able to offer a differentiated, compelling and up-to-date set of investment products while maintaining efficient processes. A related issue is whether the wealth manager has the flexibility and capacity to respond to sudden changes in investor demand for key products, e.g. after a change in interest rates, a geopolitical risk event, or a rise in demand for alternative and digital assets. 

Going forward, clients will assess their wealth management provider in terms of how rapidly and effectively they can respond to their individual needs, preferences and behaviors, including when markets are in flux. 2025 is a good year for wealth managers to assess which flexibilities they must invest in to ensure they can cater to the clients – and markets – of tomorrow.  

To grow their business, wealth managers need not only to increase their share of each client’s net wealth – they must continually attract new clients, and different kinds of client. 

However, there is a perennial tension between the need to make the onboarding process easy and quick and the need to follow KYC and AML procedures that stay the right side of increasingly stringent regulations. 

There are two key dimensions to get right, and both are evolving fast in terms of the potential for improvements: 

• Data sources and their ingestion. In addition to asking the client for information in line with regulatory requirements, firms are beginning to explore how they can use other novel forms of data and AI-driven tools to build onboarding profiles of new clients and potential clients using government databases and alternative data sources. The goal is to spot problems early in the onboarding process. The key here may be to triangulate between different data sources and types of analysis.
• Orchestrating internal processes. Increasingly, wealth managers can enhance their operating model through customizing workflows, leveraging data across organizational structures and harmonizing processes. For example, they can improve and speed up ‘source of wealth’ validation through streamlining internal processes, tools, operational workflows and operating model designs. 

Firms are finding they have different risk appetites for applying GenAI to analyze new data sources and orchestrate processes. Many will use the new tools to provide initial summaries of complex information – supporting, rather than replacing, expert professionals as they make decisions or recommendations.  

Through 2025, firms should focus on educating employees on the opportunities and challenges of adopting GenAI in onboarding and related processes, as the technology becomes more robust and prevalent, in addition to exploring specific GenAI use cases within their organizations. 

It’s often said that wealth managers are relatively slow to innovate and invest in new technologies and processes because they regard themselves as running a relationship business. However, another key reason is that their industry is driven by the need to maintain the trust of clients and regulators. 

Getting a new or revised process 99% right is not good enough when slip-ups lead to heavy fines and reputational damage – whether through poorly handled onboarding of new clients or the premature launch of a new wealth platform, module, or personalization initiative. 

Through 2025 wealth managers will begin to discover that technology itself increasingly offers a solution to this problem in areas such as: 

• Business requirements definition. At the start of the innovation process, GenAI is being deployed to accelerate and improve the definition of the business requirements that determine what exactly each innovation project must deliver. Traditionally, this task has involved considerable to-and-fro between business analysts and business and technology teams as they agree and formalize the key artefacts – such as ‘epics’ and ‘user stories’ – that guide each project. However, by ingesting structured and unstructured data sets, including videos of project-related conversations, GenAI can now rapidly generate these artefacts and present them to the analyst for validation. 
• Acceptance testing. Service innovations and changes in process need to be thoroughly tested. The key challenge here is to devise and generate tests that consider many potential scenarios, variables and conditions, allowing the testing to cover the unexpected as well as the routine. GenAI-based tools can help address this large workload in ways that improve testing speed and robustness. For example, GenAI-driven tools can be deployed to analyze key project documents and build a test plan; generate detailed test cases across multiple scenarios (with human-in-the-loop validation); create synthetic test data (to minimize PII risk); and rapidly report back on the test results.  

With so much industry change on the horizon in the Asia-Pacific region, leading wealth managers should use the coming year to explore how new technologies can help make innovation and testing processes more efficient – and more rigorous.

References 

¹ Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/insights/markets/outlook-chinas-world-wealth-hub-hong-kong-could-surpass-switzerland/
² Capco Singapore Wealth Management Survey: https://www.capco.com/intelligence/capco-intelligence/singapore-wealth-survey; Capco Hong Kong Wealth Management Survey: https://www.capco.com/Intelligence/Capco-Intelligence/hong-kong-wealth-survey 
³ Mordor Intelligence: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/asia-pacific-wealth-management-market