The wealth management segment of OCBC played an important role in taking group income higher in the first quarter.

Oversea Chinese Banking Corp, aka OCBC, yesterday said that its wealth management arm that includes Bank of Singapore, its private bank, logged a 50 per cent year-on-year gain in income in the first three months of this year, at S$724 million. This division also contributed a larger slice of overall OCBC income.

The income figure covers insurance, private banking, asset management, stockbroking and other wealth management products, OCBC said in its quarterly results statement yesterday.

As a proportion of OCBC’s total income, wealth management contributed 32 per cent, as compared with 23 per cent in 1Q16. 

OCBC’s private banking business logged a rise in assets under management to $85 billion as at 31 March 2017, up 49 per cent from $57 billion the previous year, partly because of its acquisition of the private banking businesses in Asia of Barclays, the UK-listed bank. 

Across the OCBC group as a whole, the bank logged a net profit after tax of S$973 million for the first quarter of 2017, up 14 per cent a year ago and 23 per cent higher than the previous quarter.

The “robust year-on-year performance was largely driven by sustained growth in wealth management income, higher profit from insurance operations as well as increased earnings in local currency terms from all of the group’s overseas banking subsidiaries, particularly from Indonesia”, OCBC said.

”We are pleased to report a rise in first quarter earnings. Our results reflect the underlying strength and diversity of our banking, wealth management and insurance franchise. We achieved broad-based loan growth, grew our private banking AUM, and reported significantly higher fee income. Our Hong Kong, Malaysian and Indonesian banking subsidiaries saw higher year-on-year earnings growth in local currency terms and Great Eastern continued to deliver robust underlying total weighted new sales and new business embedded value growth,” CEO Samuel Tsien said.

Rival Singapore-based DBS, which also provides private banking and wealth management, logged results for the quarter a few days' ago. See here.