Barclays to amplify operations in South and SE Asia

Barclays Wealth is set to quadruple assets and increase bankers in Singapore and other parts of the region.

Barclays Plc plans to quadruple the amount of money it manages for rich clients in South and Southeast Asia in the next five years by injecting capital and adding staff at its private-banking unit in the region.

The number of bankers covering non-resident Indians from Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as Malaysia and Indonesia, will rise by 60% by year-end and more than double by the end of 2011, said Srinivas Siripurapu, head of Southeast Asia and South Asia at London-based Barclays Wealth, in an interview on Sunday.

UK’s 3rd largest lender, Barclays said in February it will invest 350 million pounds ($517 million) in its wealth management unit.

In Asia, Barclays is entering a battle for private-banking assets and managers that the regional head of Credit Suisse Group AG’s Clariden Leu unit last week warned may drive up compensation costs.

Barclays has “these huge plans and vision of growing to a certain level, that’s what makes it exciting,” said Siripurapu, who joined the bank last August. “Everybody is growing I agree, but we are trying to grow much more than others.”

View the full story in Bloomberg.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia