Unconventional Markets as New Frontiers in Wealth Management - Essay Example

UNCONVENTIONAL MARKETS AS NEW FRONTIERS IN WEALTH MANAGEMENT Focusing on China, India, maybe Japan, ethnic minorities and wealthy women provides thebest growth opportunities for the wealth management industry over the next five years or so’ Discuss. Introduction Many professionals in the wealth management industry feel that the market is approaching saturation, with more firms making an entry into the industry and fewer investors requiring their services. Contraction of demand for financial asset management services is attributed particularly to the erosion of wealth in many portfolios due to the financial crisis of 2007. However, at the same time that traditional markets are shrinking, unconventional pockets of demand are also growing that have not been explored by financial service providers. It is the purpose of this research to provide a cursory examination of the possibilities presented by some of these markets, beginning with a brief definition of the wealth management industry. Personal wealth management defined. Personal wealth management is a subcategory of the broader field of investment management. Investment management is among one of the strong revenue-generating services provided by the financial service industry. It is defined by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the US as “the business of managing or providing advice on investment portfolios or individual assets for compensation” (OCC, 2001:1). The industry is highly competitive, giving rise to many different kinds of service providers who attempt to differentiate their services to cater to as many possible clientele having as many variable requirements as there are needs for finance. One such type of service providers are the institutional retirement and investment companies, which generate a high level of returns because of the substantial volume of business afforded by institutional businesses. Its counterpart that caters to retail investors is the personal wealth management business, which generates lower, but still highly attractive, pretax operating margins. Personal wealth management, as its name implies, requires a more closely personalized service to investors with various profiles. Accounts on the average are smaller than institutional accounts; however, personal wealth management is a faster growing segment of the industry compared to institutional investment management (OCC, 2001). The industry’s service providers have been constantly challenged with the continuously changing customer wants and needs, and the shifting investment environment. The dynamic nature of the industry has recently been rocked by wild volatility swings when the subprime market plunged occurred in the latter part of 2008. This is but an addition to the changes in investment products and services brought about by changes in investor demands and attributes, financial regulations, political leaders and their governance platforms, and technological systems and devices that transmit information about the socio-economic environment. Alternative investment vehicles have also increased and diversified, with different risk and reward potentials. While many high net worth individuals have themselves sought to manage their traditional placements, particularly in stocks and bonds, real estate, and banking investment products, new possibilities have emerged by way of hedge funds, derivatives, mutual funds, unregistered private investments, and so forth, which provide added flexibility in adjusting and enhancing a personal portfolio’s risk-return profile. The new instruments have however growing in complexity and are increasingly becoming more difficult to understand and assess as to potential risks and returns. “The investment management industry is in transition, and though it offers the opportunity for significant, recurring fee income, effectively managing [a personal investor’s] risks poses tremendous challenges” (OCC, 2001:2). There is still maintained a long-term economic growth uptrend worldwide, despite the presently ongoing economic crisis. In fact, many observers see the global market drop of 2008 as generating opportunities for taking advantage of lower valuations of quality assets, which are expected to quickly recover once the markets have regained confidence. Together with this is the emergence of new markets in countries only marginally affected by the crisis, as well as socio-economic classes and groups that have registered faster growth than others. China , India and Japan Of late, the Asian region has again captured the attention and interest of global investors, at least the first time such serious interest was generated since the Asian crisis of 1997. That particular drop has been, in retrospect, the silver lining within the storm clouds. This is because even as the West, hitherto uncorrected from its long-term bullish upswing, has succumbed to the reality check brought by the US subprime crisis. Asia, on the other hand, having experienced its precipitous drop during the bursting of the Asian economic bubble ten years earlier, have sooner adopted intensified prudential measures in their banking regulations and adopted more stringent monitoring procedures for mandatory compliance by banking and financial institutions and intermediaries. Ever since the 1997 economic shock, the Asian region has seen a strong wealth generation and accumulation growth rate. It was noted that in 2003, Asian economies have surged and produced the largest comparative rise in the number of so-called “high net worth individuals” or HNWIs. HNWIs are those individuals whose wealth exceeds more than $1 million in financial assets. As of 2004, the Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report estimated that about 7.7 million persons worldwide held that enviable distinction, with Asia accounting for 23% of the total HWNI aggregate wealth, next to Europe and the US (Moore, 2004). The financial difficulties sprung by the credit crunch and economic recession, however, have eroded the wealth of a substantial number of these individuals, not only because of the drop in valuations, but also because many of them have become more wary of investing, at the risk of being hit once more by the extreme reactions in the securities markets (Moore, 2004). Their continued reluctance to enter the trading markets has caused them to shun investment potentials in the trading floors. Returns have thus been below optimal, and for such individuals returns figures have slowed down as inflation and interest rates go up. Countering this, however, are other tendencies that point to persistent phenomena and behaviour patterns that point to an expected rise in personal wealth after retirement. Zou (1994) developed a capitalist-spirit model of savings that has proved especially suited for understanding savings across countries and over time. Through this model, the study proved that wealth holding has tended to increase with age, decumulation of wealth after retirement is not likely to happen, and households, both those with and without children, do not exhibit significant differences in savings behaviour. In the following table, the number of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) are shown as they were determined in the Capgemini/Merrill Lunch World Wealth Report 2004. It is presented to show the trends in the accumulation of HNWI financial wealth prior to the onset of the financial crisis of 2007; thus, 2008E figures are most likely overstated as a whole. Still the figures portray a trend that may well resume once the recession has ended and economic recovery has begun. It is evident from the foregoing table that sans the effects of the financial crisis, the Asia-Pacific region is considered to be among the better performing regions in the world as far as the growth of HNWI financial wealth is concerned, following North America and Europe, and well above Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The HNWI is an excellent indicator for the growth of market demand for personal wealth management services, inasmuch as the increase in the number of high net worth individuals is indicative of the growing need for advisory services in the region. Hua (2008) likens the China of today with the Japan of the 1980s, with regard to her growing stock market, surging property market, an ascendant currency, and rapid accumulation of substantial foreign reserves (p. 203). There are already a good number of Western banks offering wealth management services operating in China. Citi, for instance, has began to systematically hiring some excellent relationship managers for their private banking services on the mainland, targeting the super rich (defined as persons with assets valued at US$10 million or more). Domestic firms including the Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, and China CITIC Bank are among the local financial institutions that have already established new wealth management service products. The proliferation of banks with these capabilities, though, find themselves having difficulty with completely different lifestyle and mindset of their clients. One other difficulty this industry has is that while relatively more experienced wealth management expertise is available from abroad, present laws do not make offshore banking services available to Chinese customers. It thus becomes necessary for personal wealth management businesses who want to do business with lucrative clientele in China to be operating within the country with duly registered offices (Hua, 2008: 213). As an indicator of the accumulation of disposable income, the growth of the market for diamonds, a luxury good, provides a useful proxy. According to experts, this market will increase by some 15-20 percent per annum. Presently Japan generates a demand of 11% of the world market for diamonds, followed by China with 9%. But due to China’s faster economic growth, it is expected to soon overtake Japan, and it is speculated that Shanghai will become one of the world’s central trading centers for diamond trade. Shanghai alone is expected to account for US$3 billion to US$5 billion, bringing the number of people involved in the industry up to some 100,000 (Reuvid, 2006, p. 228). Aside from China, another high growth country that is proving itself to be a viable market for the expansion of personal wealth management services is India. Like China, India is the other in the world that boasts of more than a billion population, but which recently had marked economic progress on the back of the software and services industry. That a plethora of high net worth individuals have sprung up and have come to constitute a demand for wealth management services is an understatement. According to Business India (2006:114), “To substantiate the point with numbers, according to secondary research, India has witnessed a high net worth individuals population growth of 14.6 per cent in 2004 vis-a-vis the world growth rate of 7.3 per cent.” Likewise, according to Nargundkar (2006), “Wealth management as an organised industry is growing in terms of both the number of players as well as the number of high net worth individuals in India,” thus fuelling very rapid growth. While the economies of China and India have registered solid growth rates in absolute and real terms from at least the beginning of the millennium, their huge populations have often been cited as the factor that keeps meaningful progress from being attained. However, a cursory examination of the per capita GDP of these countries, expressed in purchasing power parity (PPP) and as estimated by the IMF, shows a steady and sustained improvement. This is in part due to the strong productivity in the economies of these countries, coupled with systematic and sustained population control programs and measures meant to keep population expansion in check. The table that follows shows the calculated compound growth rates associated with the per capita GDP of China, India and Japan. Per Capita GDP (1990 International Geary-Khamis dollars)       6-year IMF   1997 2003 Growth 2009 est Growth China 3,013 4,803 0.917 6,546 0.84 India 1,680 2,160 0.812 2,932 0.84 Japan 20,929 21,218 0.490 32,817 0.90 Real GDP Growth Rates, 2007-2009F (IMF estimates) (Source: IMF, 2009 & Maddison, 2008) From 1997 to 2003, China’s per capita GDP registered a compound annual growth rate of 91.7%, followed by India with 81.2% and Japan with 49% growth rate. Japan’s slower growth is understandable, in that the country has already attained an extremely (comparatively) high level of per capita GDP at 21,218 PPP (in 1990 International Geary-Khamis Dollars, the equivalent buying power compared to the US$ in the year 1990). For the year 2009, the estimated per capita GDP figures by the IMF shows approximately 84% growth for China and Japan, and 90% for Japan. India’s growth rate continues to increase, while China’s is expected to slow down slightly – possibly also intentionally, as the authorities have recognized a need for China’s continual double-digit growth to be reined in, in order to avoid the chances of the economy overheating. Japan, after a long-term economic slump, is seen to begin to pick up again and register significant positive growth – although the figures may be somewhat overstated due to slight errors introduced by estimation. In the following figure, the real GDP growth rates of several countries are presented in bar graph form, depicting progressions in the growth rates from 2007 to 2009 forecasted year-end values. This report was prepared midyear of 2009, thus the forecast is the annualized expected figure based on the performance in the early part of the year. Real GDP Growth Rates, 2007-2009F Source document: Capgemini/Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report, 2009, p. 8 The 2009 forecasted growth rates are negative for most of the countries, due to the effect of the financial crisis. Hardest hit appears to be Singapore, Japan and Germany, in that order. The figure for Japan here appears to contradict that of the previous analysis, until one considers that this is the for past three years while the former compares across the past six years, thus the base year is different and the two findings may still be consistent. What is most apparent here, however, are the growth figures for China and India. The two countries stand out among the others in that despite the crisis situation in the global financial markets, China and India still continue to register positive (albeit slower) growth rates. Still with a substantial positive 6% growth for China, and 5% for India, and forecasted from midway in the pertinent fiscal year, these are testament to the newfound strength and resilience of the economies of these two countries. It is also often pointed out, however, that, the so-called theoretical per-capita GDP is misleading as a measure of dispersed economic wealth, because such newly created prosperity is usually concentrated among those sectors that own the factors of production, and there is hardly any guarantee of a “trickle-down” effect. The following table, therefore, is useful in depicting the degree to which economic wealth is distributed among the different levels of society. Wealth dissemination among the socio-economic strata Source: Davies, Sandtrom, Shorrocks, & Wolff, 5 December 2006. Looking at China and India, it appears that the countries’ strong per capita GDP growth rates are, comparatively speaking, being more efficiently shared among more households and individuals in society than in many other countries. In China, it will be noted that almost 60% of the wealth is shared by the lower 90% of the population, and that the share of the lowest 40% of the population (in terms of economic standing) have a share of a proportionately larger part of the nation’s wealth (approximately 10%) than the other countries in the table. This may be attributed to the socialist nature of the politico-economic ideology of China, but by whatever mechanism, the poorer members of society are able to partake of a relatively larger portion of the wealth. Coupled with this is the cultural slant towards frugality and savings; Chinese urban households are adept at smoothing household consumption, and are strongly motivated towards precautionary saving. There is, however, difficulty in smoothing the educational expenditure, which tends to suggest resort to government assistance and subsidy in order to stave off further income inequality (Meng, 2003). For India, there appears to be a slightly higher concentration of wealth among the highest 10% of the social strata (at 53%), and at the top 1%. This points to a relative inefficiency in wealth distribution at the upper levels, in comparison with China. However, as one goes down the social strata, it appears that the 47% or so shared by the lowest 90% is at least better distributed to the economic levels below. From these data, it thus may be surmised that there are more persons or households benefiting from the wealth being created in the nation’s economy. The effect of this is the collective movement of more people upwards in the economic ladder, allowing the increase in high networth individuals as more persons accumulate more wealth. This buying power in the hands of more people mean that more products in terms of goods and services will tend to move, rather than if the wealth were concentrated in the hands of a few, which does not necessarily increase consumption that would drive the economy towards further growth. “The rising affluence of China and India opens up new market destinations for higher added-value products and services.” (Deloitte, 2006:101). In comparison, a glance at the figures for developed countries US, UK, Germany and Canada show a disparate imbalance in the distribution of wealth, with greater wealth concentrated at the upper strata of society. By the same rationale, it may be said that by proportion, there would be comparatively fewer HNWI in these countries than China and India. Finally, in Japan, the asset management industry, of which the personal wealth management business is an integral part, leads in volume and performance over the rest of the Southeast Asian nations (Daiwa Institute of Research, 2006). That being said, the asset management industry (AMI) in Japan still falls short of the level of invested funds attained through AMI in other leading countries. The following table shows a comparison of investment levels in the various financial assets in Japan, the USA, the UK and Germany, as of 2005, prior to the development of the financial crisis. Source: Daiwa Institute of Research, 2006, p. 17 The size of the Japanese household financial assets market easily exceeds that of UK and Germany combined, but still pales beside the US market. From the rate for the various asset classes, however, Japan is seen to have a much higher proportion of its household wealth invested in bank deposits and cash – at least twice that of the USA. It has less than a fifth the proportion of wealth invested by Germany in bonds and half that of that of the US for the same asset class; its proportion invested in stocks is also much lower than either the US or UK. These figures indicate that much of the investible wealth generated by households ends up being under-invested. The implications are that these funds do not realize the optimum returns they should be earning for their owners. Even bonds, which are generally considered safe havens for funds because of their fixed-income, low-risk features, is not optimally explored by most Japanese investors. In summary the foregoing section point to the viability of China, India and Japan as potential markets for personal wealth management service providers – China and India because of their steady economic growth and wealth generation, Japan because of its large pool of uninvested funds. Women and Minorities Other than novel markets developed overseas, it is also possible for new markets to be culled from wealth either already present or with a strong potential of existing in the near future, that are generated by segments of society heretofore unexplored. This pertains to the women and members of cultural and racial minorities who have, by virtue of affirmative action, benefited from more equitable access to jobs, business opportunities, and other income generating activities. Another source is inheritance; as Bell (2005) put it, a significant number of young American women are poised to inherit hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades, and even today are being courted by financial services professionals and advisors. These sectors are generally not conceived of as potential demand for wealth management services as they do not fit the conventional profile of the traditional investor, and thus are often overlooked (Rosa et al., 1996). However, they have been generating pools of investible funds that their owners have little knowledge in managing. Hillman and Cannella (2002) determined that in a study of corporate boardrooms, female and African-American directors were more likely to hold advanced degrees and join multiple boards at a faster rate than white male directors, indicating strong upward mobility. What sets women apart from men in matters of finance is the difference in the situations they will be facing in life. On the average, women live longer than men, and more complicated careers. Marriage for women often brings a financial independence that is not entirely resented, but may redound to their disadvantage and at times arrangements to this effect would be uncomfortable. Women often are responsible for raising children to have sound values, both financially and in other aspects, and usually also shoulder additional financial burden in taking care of older family relations. Finally, after years of living lives circumscribed by financial interdependence, they suddenly find themselves living on their own after the death of spouse and parents, and the children leaving the family home to live their own lives (Bodnar, 2006). According to Bodnar (2006), women make excellent wealth management clients. This is because, more than men, women drivers tend to ask for directions when lost. In investing, women are more likely to conduct research before they put their money in an investment vehicle. The Mutual Fund Fact Book (1997) also says of women investors: “Thirty-two percent of fund-owning household investment decision makers are solely women. As a group, they are very similar to male household investment decision makers except that they tend to be slightly older…” Many blacks are earning more now than in the past, although their wealth still falls slightly behind. Native Americans as a group are worse off in terms of management of larger companies, although this has the potential of reversing at any time. This is because many of the modern management theories in place in the corporate world are actually consistent with the leadership principles that underlie the cultures of some native American tribal nations (e.g. stewardship and servant leadership). With the expanding and increasingly sophisticated field of human resources, it will not be long before this special strength is tapped, allowing for members of this ethnic group to play a stronger role in mainstream corporate life (Karsten, 2006). The foray of racial minorities is somewhat hampered by discriminatory practices that still prevail at the present, though such incidences are decreasing, thanks to legislation particularly on affirmative action. On average, there exists some statistical discrimination among lenders – specifically finance companies and businesses – against black- and Hispanic-owned businesses as far as interest rates on approved loans are concerned. This would likely prompt financial regulators to conduct the necessary inquiries and file the necessary legal actions against firms that discriminate on the basis of race. The likelihood of such happening grows with the increasing number of blacks and Hispanics putting up their own businesses and growing in affluence (Blanchard, Zhao & Yinger, 2008). In any case, racial and ethnic minorities are quickly gaining ground from their disadvantaged past. Stevenson and Plath (2002) observed that the African-American market for financial services has rapidly expanded in size and viability. The growth provides strong prospects for marketers of financial services, since statistical data exists confirming that the financial asset profiles of black households lag behind those of their white counterparts as far as breadth and depth of holdings are concerned, especially in relatively risky, high-yield financial assets. The authors conducted a study on the African-American consumer’s buyer behaviour. A few of them are tabulated below; they are reproduced because of their implications on African-Americans as potential clients. The profile arrived at for African-American households could quite possibly reflect the condition of other minorities, as far as consumer behaviour is concern. From the above, this social group presents particularly strong opportunities for financial services, since they more readily admit to a lack of experience and a need for advice, exert extra care in researching information before making an investment, and usually encourage close-knit family members to likewise invest, creating a pool of referrals for potential clientele. Conclusion The coming decade promises a redefinition of the investment landscape, as new, non-traditional investors acquire the resources for which they will require the services of wealth managers. Asset management companies bent on strategic innovations would do well to look towards strong emerging markets overseas, or recently progressive social classes with the resources to invest. This paper provided a few of these alternatives, and the possibilities are far from exhausted. WORDCOUNT = 4,000 excluding title and question References Bell, A 2005 Shes Young And Will Be Rich...Reach Her Now. 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