As the markets adjust to the opportunities across both institutional and retail markets in Asia Pacific markets, the industry has seen several trends. Wealth Management offerings across a wide spectrum of institutions including family and multi-family offices, boutique wealth managers, and private banking services offered by global financial institutions have been the most visible area of growth, led by the financial centres of Singapore and Hong Kong. Many of these financial institutions provide robust wealth management platforms for retail (non-accredited) investors and are beginning to deploy sophisticated digital and robo-advisory services to retail customers, with investment solutions that can resemble more sophisticated private banking offerings, including retail hedge funds in UCITS format offering daily liquidity.
As the financial services industry in Asia Pacific continues to evolve, we see several trends that will influence the future of institutional, wealth management, and retail offerings over the next few years. At the forefront is a transition towards ESG offerings to meet quickly changing customer demands, encompassing both retail and private market funds. Within the past 18 months, the market has seen traditional private equity, private credit, real estate, and venture capital funds adopt ESG overlays across their new portfolios, demonstrating that ESG has impacted all aspects of the asset management industry. Markets that were early adopters of ESG, such as Australian Superfunds, have begun to demand extremely strict ESG guidelines that can include the adoption of external ESG advisory boards that provide oversight and approval of all underlying fund positions.
Several funds launched in late 2020 provide private market returns with highly flexible liquidity options for investors.
The second trend will be the provision of access to private market fund solutions that previously were only available to institutional and sophisticated wealth management clients. The past decade has seen the unprecedented involvement of central banks in global markets, providing important backstops to markets when necessary (global financial crisis, Covid-19) and maintaining these policies in what appears to be a perpetual state of intervention. The result has been a decline in fixed income returns to record lows, eliminating a critical source of returns and income for investors and exacerbating wealth disparity, that have become a political and economic concern for politicians, regulators, and economists in developed and developing markets alike.
Private market firms have begun to create retail friendly solutions, allowing access to fund strategies, including private equity, private credit, and real estate, that were once only available to accredited investors, and providing a much-needed source of returns and income to investors. Several funds launched in late 2020 provide private market returns with highly flexible liquidity options for investors, and new entrants in the digital asset management space have begun to provide marketplaces for secondary fund liquidity that have proven highly successful. In December 2020, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved amendments to the accredited investor definition, expanding access to private market fund solutions to a much wider set of participants, a regulatory change that will likely be adopted by other global regulators in an effort to widen the scope of addressable funds to investors.