In Depth: How Hong Kong Became a Global Wealth Magnet
Hong Kong has recorded strong growth in its wealth management business.
In 2024, cross-border wealth booked in the city surged by $231 billion to $2.7 trillion, putting Hong Kong on par with Switzerland, the long-time leader in cross-border wealth management, according to Boston Consulting Group Inc.’s latest Global Wealth Report. The surge was the largest in the world that year.
Hong Kong’s own numbers tell a similar story. In 2024, net fund inflows into the city’s wealth and asset management industry soared 81% to HK$705 billion ($90.7 billion), according to the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). And the assets under management in the private banking and private wealth management business grew by 15% to more than HK$10 trillion.
This growth looks set to continue, driven by Asia’s growing wealth and a need to diversify assets amid a fragmenting geopolitical environment, Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) Chief Executive Eddie Yue said at a wealth management summit on Nov. 6 last year.
Evidence of the trend can be seen in the hiring figures for the industry. As of August, several major private banks in the city had expanded their private banking or private wealth management workforce by nearly 400 people, or 12%, over the past two years, Yue said in an earlier article.
“The IPO market was the focus in 2025, but when it comes to hiring by Chinese and foreign financial institutions in Hong Kong, the wealth management industry is on fire,” a veteran banker from a Chinese-funded lender said.
Hong Kong’s wealth management didn’t begin to recover from its pandemic-era drought until 2023. The recovery took off in earnest the following year, when the city’s combined asset and wealth management businesses grew by 13%, according to the SFC.
Hong Kong has long been well-suited to be competitive in the wealth management industry. A recent report by HSBC Private Bank ticked off the city’s advantages: a sound regulatory framework, abundant capital, a deep talent pool and long experience serving as a gateway to the Chinese mainland.
That connection to the mainland has emerged as one of the crucial factors behind the recovery. For many Chinese companies “going global,” Hong Kong has become their first stop for offshore wealth generated on the mainland. The Hong Kong IPO boom, along with the city’s embrace of digital assets, has boosted demand for someone to manage all the newly minted wealth.
Mainland connection
If Switzerland made its name in wealth management from its commitment to confidentiality and geopolitical neutrality, then Hong Kong’s ascent was built on its unparalleled access to the immense wealth created by mainland companies.
This connection has only grown in importance since Chinese companies have moved beyond exporting products to expanding supply chains and services overseas. This “going global” strategy requires entrepreneurs and their executive teams to work or even reside in different countries and regions, creating a new, geographically diverse set of financial needs. For Raffles Family Office, which has dual headquarters in Hong Kong and Singapore, the firm is now preparing to establish a third in the United Arab Emirates through an acquisition.
This demand for global asset allocation is not limited to the super-rich with access to family office services. A clear indicator of a broader trend among ordinary mainland residents is the surge in purchases of Hong Kong insurance products. Following the pandemic, as cross-border travel normalized, premiums for new policies bought by mainland visitors climbed to HK$62.8 billion in 2024, the highest level since 2016. This figure accounted for one-third of the city’s total new policy premiums that year.
According to Leon Qi, international head of China financial research at investment group CLSA, Hong Kong insurance products offer flexible designs that complement mainland policies, higher returns that attract yield-seeking investors, and a channel for allocating capital to assets denominated in foreign currencies. The booming business prospects have not gone unnoticed, with mainland company Yuexiu Group recently acquiring an insurer in the city, and JD.com Inc. obtaining an insurance brokerage license there.
Beyond insurance, the Cross-Boundary Wealth Management Connect scheme, which covers residents of Hong Kong, Macao and nine cities in Guangdong province, has undergone explosive growth since February 2024. As of June 2025, the number of participating retail investors had topped 160,000. Diao Zhihai, head of China International Capital Corp. Ltd.’s (CICC) international wealth management business, told Caixin that the industry is already anticipating an expansion of the scheme to meet demand from clients in Shanghai and Beijing.
This creates a powerful two-way dynamic. As Wang Jianli, another CICC executive, pointed out, wealth management firms are positioned not only to help Chinese residents diversify their assets globally, but also to serve the growing number of international investors looking to get into the Chinese market.
Fueled by IPOs and digital assets
A resurgent Hong Kong stock market has served as a powerful engine for minting new wealth in need of management. “Hong Kong ranked as the world’s top IPO venue in 2025,” the exchange said in a news release, noting that as of Dec. 19, the city’s IPOs raised more than HK$274 billion for the year.
The IPO boom is directly responsible for generating new clients for the city’s wealth managers. Wang Fengyu, an asset management industry insider, told Caixin that many of Hong Kong’s new high-net-worth individuals are the shareholders of new public companies. After going public in Hong Kong, they truly have a considerable amount of offshore wealth that needs professional management, he said.
Beyond the roar of the traditional stock market, Hong Kong is aggressively carving out a niche on the financial frontier of virtual assets. Since issuing a landmark policy statement in October 2022, the city has moved faster than many other mainstream financial centers to build a comprehensive regulatory framework for digital assets, attracting both crypto-native capital and traditional investors.
The new wealth has also generated demand for someone to manage it. Digital assets have grown from low single-digit percentages to about 10% of client portfolios at Raffles Family Office over the past year, CEO Chi Man Kwan said. This trend has been bolstered by Singapore’s tightening regulation of the crypto industry, which sent a fresh wave of talent and capital flowing back to Hong Kong.
The regulatory support is tangible. As of this past October, 51 asset management firms had upgraded their licenses to cover digital assets, underscoring Hong Kong’s push to anchor digital assets within its asset management ecosystem.
Contact editors Michael Bellart (michaelbellart@caixin.com) and Lin Jinbing (jinbinglin@caixin.com)
caixinglobal.com is the English-language online news portal of Chinese financial and business news media group Caixin. Global Neighbours is authorized to reprint this article.
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