In April, Singapore-based investment platform Endowus launched in Hong Kong, having bought multifamily office Carret Private two years earlier. Cutting-edge technology enables the team to manage over US$6 billion in assets, and making money purely from client fees rather than commissions from fund managers means Endowus concentrates on developing just the right investment plan for each individual.
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A world-class financial hub like Hong Kong should have these types of firms to spare, yet Endowus’ managing director and Hong Kong head Steffanie Yuen spent much of her early career navigating the pain points of the city’s financial services before meeting founders Gregory Van and Samuel Rhee.
Yuen’s first wins were signposts of her later career trajectory. Early on she invested in insurance firm Ping An Group subsidiaries like Lufax and Ping An Healthcare and Technology, noticing early the shift towards online or hybrid models for traditionally offline sectors. Yuen then joined the International Wealth Management function at Ant Group in 2017, taking Ant’s innovations to regional jurisdictions, such as Ascend Money in Thailand, to help them modernise.
“I felt like the first wave of wealthtech was about access and convenience,” recalled Yuen. “It’s like when you have an electronic stock trading platform like Robinhood, but there’s too many products and you get really overwhelmed.” She likens the situation at the time to giving Ferraris to people without driving licences. “The missing part was, how do I help clients learn to safely drive this really powerful car?”
Covid-19 eventually brought Yuen back to Hong Kong. It was then she joined asset manager Value Partners and began to engage with the Hong Kong market specifically, where wealth management seemed to operate a little differently, especially for individual investors like herself. Besides exorbitant subscription fees, Yuen found that the commissions-based models of intermediaries heavily affected their investment advice.
“You go to existing bank branches and the people you talk to are not advisers,” stated Yuen. “The market is very concentrated in Hong Kong and distributors have a lot of bargaining power. They try to push you a product … like, this month, this is the fund. But we’re all very different. I might have a different investment goal versus you.”
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Before Value Partners, Yuen had already tried to bring a “fee-only” model with that advisory element to Hong Kong with Vanguard Investment Advisors (Shanghai), a joint venture between Vanguard’s US counterpart and Ant Group. There Yuen led marketing and business development but she found the market was not ready for a fresh approach.