As perhaps the hottest private banking and wealth management market in the world, Asia is full of executives desperate to promote their firm, and full of firms desperate to poach influential bankers from their competitors.

As perhaps the hottest private banking and wealth management market in the world, Asia is full of executives desperate to promote their firm, and full of firms desperate to poach influential bankers from their competitors.

Here’s Wealth Briefing’s current non-exhaustive list of some of the region’s “most influential” private bankers, as of March 2007.

Of course, we could blink an eye and any one of these people could soon be working for the opposition next week. For instance, Barclays Wealth has just hired Didier von Daeniken, Credit Suisse’s former co-head of Asia Pacific Private Banking and head of Private Banking in Southeast Asia and Australasia.

And as these profiles show, some of the bankers on our list have had several lives in the industry already.

Joachim Straehle – head of Bank Sarasin and Co
Mr Straehle’s move from Credit Suisse to the smaller Bank Sarasin in February last year hinted that big things were going to happen at his new bank, and those suspicions have proved to be correct.

Mr Straehle was a 20 year veteran at Credit Suisse, and had played a large role in turning Singapore into Credit Suisse’s largest private banking centre out of Switzerland.

So when Sarasin landed him, they got a big fish.

Since he joined Sarasin, Rabobank has become the majority shareholder after exercising its option in January and this is expected to give Sarasin even more momentum in Asian private banking.

Having been poached from Credit Suisse himself, Mr Straehle has proved to be adept at poaching other bankers and successfully raided HSBC for several senior executives last December.

Mr Straehle may be spending most of his time in Switzerland these days, but it would be foolish not to rank him as one of Asia’s most influential.

Marcel Kreis – head of Credit Suisse private banking in Asia
Mr Kreis was another major poaching story of 2006 when he was lured away in July from his position as head of wealth management at UBS and joined Credit Suisse to run its Asian private bank.

Of course Credit Suisse needed a new chief after it lost Joachim Straehle to Sarasin, and in Kreis it secured one of the big names in Asian private banking.

Under Mr Kreis, UBS maintained a dominant position in Asian private banking, and built the operation up to a point where it had more than 1,500 staff in its two main centres, Hong Kong and Singapore.

At Credit Suisse, Mr Kreis is facing a major challenge from the likes of Standard Chartered, which has embarked on a hiring spree of its own and existing players such as UBS and relative newcomer Julius Baer, to name only two.

Credit Suisse is also looking to expand, and last September unveiled plans to hire 140 client managers in the next 12 months. Mr Kreis was also able to pull a major coup for Credit Suisse by luring Anuj Khanna, a former UBS colleague, across to head up Credit Suisse private banking in North Asia.

Leslie Menkes –Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley doesn’t make a lot of noise in Asia but with more than $20 billion under management at its wealth management arm in Asia it is starting to get noticed.

That might not be a lot when compared with the $100 billion or so UBS has under management, but under Ms Menkes’ leadership those assets grew about 35 per cent last year, driven by strong growth in China, Indonesia and India.

Ms Menkes, who heads up wealth management in south-east Asia, India and Australasia, has said she is confident Morgan Stanley can maintain double digit growth, and boldly says “our assumption is north of 20 per cent.”

Morgan Stanley hasn’t been above doing some poaching of its own either, bringing across a team from Goldman Sachs to head its Indonesian business. Ms Menkes has deep experience in Asia, having set up Morgan Stanley’s Singapore wealth management operation in 1995 before moving to Hong Kong, and then returning to Singapore in 2000.

Hans Diederen – ABN AMRO
A recent appointee as head of the Dutch bank’s private banking business for North Asia, Mr Diederen is the man charged with making inroads into the Chinese market in the new era of financial liberalisation.

ABN AMRO is already well entrenched in the Chinese mainland, where it has a retail presence and is already using its Van Gogh preferred banking program as a feeder to private clients. ABN AMRO private banking has around $15 billion in assets under management in Asia and that grew by around 25 per cent over 2006.

He already has experience in Asia, having worked in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2000 before doing a stint in Asia.

Currently, about 50 per cent of ABM AMRO private banking’s business is booked onshore in Hong Kong, and Mr Diederen’s challenge is to build up staff on the ground in other centres.

With only five front line people in Shanghai and 40 in Taiwan, there’s a lot of expanding to do and ABN AMRO are putting great faith in Mr Diederen that he can deliver in what is one of the most challenging private banking markets in the world.

Andrea Benenati – Julius Baer
After an absence of several years from the Hong Kong scene, Switerland’s Julius Baer is back in the region and has energetically launched a new North Asian office to complement its operation in Singapore.

Andreas Benenati is the bank’s new chief executive for North Asia, and in a recent interview with WealthBriefing he pointed out that Asia had now become Julius Baer’s major international investment.

Naturally, Julius Baer wants some return on this investment, and has a target of breaking even in Asia by 2008.

In five years time, the bank wants a quarter of its assets under management to come from emerging markets, the majority from Asia.

To achieve that, of course, will require some aggression and this is already in evidence in the bank’s recruitment strategy, where it has been one of the most active particularly in the Singapore market.

As a virtual start-up operation, the risks are great, and Benenati is likely feeling considerable pressure to perform. That pressure is likely to drive some aggressive behaviour from a new, but still influential, player in Asia.

[Editor's note: Who should be on WealthBriefing's next Asia wealth management influence list?

Email you views on who and why to: stephen.harris@wealthbriefing.com]