A prominent headhunter firm in Asia has expanded its team in areas such as asset management, risk and compliance.

Huddleston Jones, the Singapore-headquartered executive search firm specialising in wealth management, has made a raft of senior appointments in a move it says cements its commitment to the region.

In a newly-created role, Peter Henke joins as managing director and regional head of asset management. Henke has an extensive background within the sector in Asia, based in Singapore and Japan.

“Peter will be instrumental in developing our existing relationships and expanding our services into prime brokerage, securities services, private equity, hedge funds and investment management,” said Danny Jones, co-founder and head of retained search at Huddleston Jones.

As banks globally focus on corporate governance and financial regulation, Huddleston Jones has also expanded its capability outside of front office, with two strategic hires to target the compliance and risk sector. Katherine Ho joins from Tom Roche & Associates as executive director and regional head of treasury and risk management, in addition to Vivien Lai, who will lead the compliance focus in the Asia-Pacific region.

Finally, Amod Jain has been hired as a director to increase support for front-office assignments within the group’s wealth management division. Jain joined mid-2015 from Carlton Senior Appointments to develop and expand communication with senior relationship managers across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East/GCC region.

“The uncertain economic times of the past few years have had a major effect on how financial institutions view compliance and risk management; high demand and limited talent pools make these sectors two of the hardest to source talent in Asia,” said Arran Huddleston, co-founder of the firm. “By appointing two industry veterans in these respective fields, we now have the resources and expertise to provide specialist services to meet critical hiring demand that remain core to our clients.”

Jones added that asset and wealth management remains the core business field of Huddleston Jones. “Whilst placing specialists is our objective, we believe it’s our search knowledge and highly targeted approach to mandates that both defines and differentiates us,” he said.