Nov 28, 2016
Barclays misses target on Asia wealth unit sale
Barclays has raised almost a third less than expected from the $225m sale of its wealth and investment management business in Singapore and Hong Kong to Singapore's Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp. When the deal was announced in April, Barclays had indicated it could fetch $320m from selling the business, which had $18.3bn of assets under management at the end of last year and was initially valued at about $500m. Barclays said the deal would reduce its risk-weighted assets by about £800m. It follows the sale of the bank's US wealth management business and of several retail banking and credit card operations in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Singapore-based banks have been busy acquiring several of the Asian wealth management businesses that have been sold in recent years by foreign banks that decided to sell up having struggled to achieve sufficient scale. ANZ Banking Group said earlier this year it was selling its wealth management and retail business in Singapore, Hong Kong and three other Asian markets to DBS, the Singapore-based bank that also bought Société Générale's Asian private bank in 2014. Some big western banks, such as UBS, Credit Suisse, HSBC and Standard Chartered, are still seeking to expand in Asian private banking and wealth management, betting on continued rapid growth in the number of millionaires and billionaires in the region.
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