Hong Kong’s long-term wealth hub status safe from mainland investment curbs: JPMorgan exec

Beijing’s recent curbs on cross-border investment and a tax shift targeting overseas insurance gains may create short-term uncertainty, but they will not undermine Hong Kong’s long-term competitiveness as a major wealth management hub, according to a senior executive at JPMorgan Chase.

Kwang Kam-shing, Hong Kong CEO and chairwoman of North Asia at the biggest bank by assets in the United States, said she remained optimistic about the long-term outlook for Asia’s financial sector, citing continued wealth creation in the region and sustained cross-border activities.

“It’s too early to know what the impact will be,” Kwang said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post, when asked about the impact of Beijing’s recent policy shift on cross-border investment.

“But I don’t think it would change the direction of the long-term trajectory,” she added. “Hong Kong will continue to be able to play a very important role for high-net-worth customers looking to manage their wealth and to invest globally.”

In late May, Beijing tightened controls on offshore investment, with Hong Kong regulators requiring financial firms in the city to ask mainland investment ­clients to declare whether their sources of funding came from offshore. Earlier this month, several major mainland cities, including tax bureaus in Shanghai, also began collecting a 20 per cent levy on gains from offshore insurance policies.

Despite these hurdles, Kwang said wealthy clients in mainland China and the wider region maintained strong demand for investment diversification, succession planning and philanthropic arrangements to continue family legacies. Those needs, she added, played to Hong Kong’s strengths, given its active capital markets and established financial infrastructure.