Bank of China International has launched private banking operations in Hong Kong on T24 Model Bank, the  wealth management platform provided by the Swiss financial services firm Temenos.

BOCI has adopted T24 to enable its Hong Kong-based investment managers to have a 360-degree view of their private banking clients’ portfolios and to generate enhanced reports and analytics on their investments, as well as giving the bank a real time, business-wide view of its risk exposure. The fact that the platform is modular will also create efficiency and cost gains as it reduces the number of systems to be maintained, Temenos said in a statement. Additionally, the system runs on Microsoft’s SQL server and this is anticipated to further reduce the bank’s cost base.

It comes as no surprise that Hong Kong’s high net worth population is a priority for BOCI, as it is Asia’s largest wealth management market, and firms both domestic and foreign are anxious not to miss out on the Asia Pacific region’s impressive increase in affluence. Asia Pacific economies continue to grow at a fast pace and the creation of wealth is rising in step. The wealth of Asia Pacific HNW individuals stood at $9.7 trillion at the end of 2009, up 30.9 per cent on a year earlier and above the $9.5 trillion held by Europe’s HNW individuals, according to the Merrill Lynch CapGemini 2010 World Wealth Report. For the first time ever, the HNW population in Asia Pacific was as large as that of Europe, at 3 million.

Bank of China International's private banking unit in Hong Kong will focus on clients with net asset in excess of $1 million.