Some wealth managers could say goodbye to up to 30 per cent of their clients amid a general crackdown on dirty or undeclared money in Asia, one consultant says.

A Hong Kong-based consultant reckons some wealth managers in the region could eject up to 30 per cent of their clients to clean up their books amid a number of financial scandals and a push for tax transparency.

Benjamin Quinlan, chief executive of his eponymous firm, Quinlan & Associates, made the prediction, according to a report by Reuters. He later confirmed the report of his comments to this news service. 

As the Common Reporting Standard kicks in from the start of next year for dozens of financial jurisdictions, the drive for tax transparency will put banks and other firms under more pressure to ditch high-risk clients. CRS is a global regime through which countries swap information with one another. Ironically, the US, the world’s largest economy, is not a signatory.

All of this action on tax transparency has "sparked a major review and filtering process," Quinlan was reported as saying, "with one global private bank we spoke to looking to off-board roughly 3,000 wealth management clients in Asia in 2017".

The article did not say if Quinlan identified any specific banks by name.

Recent months have seen crackdowns on banks in jurisdictions such as Singapore, for example. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has banned the local arm of Switzerland’s BSI from operating in the city-state, as well as Falcon Private Bank, and has fined Standard Chartered and Coutts (see here). 

The Singapore-based executive search firm Huddleston Jones recently told WealthBriefingAsia about some of the headwinds facing bankers in different parts of Asia. Indonesia, for example, is operating a tax amnesty in a bid to repatriate funds out of international financial centres, and regulators have chased after transactions linked to 1MDB, the Malaysian state-run fund accused of letting certain high-ranking persons siphon off funds.