We talk to Saxo about its approach to serving EAMs, and how it competes with private banks and traditional players – but it co-operates with them as well.

The move to fee-only wealth management business models in Asia has driven the rise of external asset managers; EAMs are now an important business segment for Saxo in Singapore and the wider Asia region, a senior figure says.

Founded in 1992, Saxo Bank – the parent firm – has prided itself on being a modern, non-traditional financial services group with a strong focus on its trading platform. Initially targeting the retail space, Saxo in Singapore has pushed into serving institutions – including wealth managers, single-family offices, and others. 

About a quarter of the revenues that Saxo earns for its institutional business in Singapore stems from the wealth management segment, Ivan Chang, regional manager, institutional business, told WealthBriefingAsia in a call. 

Chang is part of a team of 12 people working on the institutional side of Saxo’s business in the Asian city-state. Chang has worked at the Copenhagen-headquartered group for almost 14 years – a period that has seen Singapore thrive in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Prior to joining Saxo, he was a sales and relationship manager at Bloomberg for the terminal business across Southeast Asia. Before that, Chang, who had developed an e-book service since his time in university, was a technology startup co-founder. A tech-driven approach to financial services appears to be very much part of his makeup.

EAMs are benefiting from a generational shift in how HNW and ultra-HNW people want to manage their money.

“EAMs will say 'If I want to give clients the best experience, I am now able to provide compelling alternative custodian recommendations that offer more products, with a secure system, and save tons of costs for clients, and make my business more scalable,'” Chang said. The key is to put a wide variety of client-centric elements on a platform for EAMs. “More EAMs are engaging with us because of that,” he said. 

The EAM-related revenues are clearly feeding into Saxo’s overall results. In 2024, Saxo reported full-year 2024 adjusted net profit of DKK1.074 billion ($160 million), up from DKK653 million in 2023, while total client assets rose to DKK853 billion from DKK745 billion. Client numbers rose to 1.286 million, from 1.159 million. Saxo does not disclose how many EAMs and family offices it serves.

Choices
Organisations such as family offices and EAMs will still want to use banks, such as global banks and domestic Singaporean banks, but they also want more choice and variety – which is where Saxo comes in, Chang said. “They no longer need to have all their eggs in one basket.”

There has been a “decoupling” and shift in the way people use banks: “We see our role as a digital online custodian as part of that,” Chang said.

Singapore and Hong Kong continue, Chang said, to flourish as financial centres. In the case of Singapore, it benefits from a “virtuous circle” of rising wealth, an influx of talent and businesses offering more connections and services to the wealth management segment, and thus attracting more wealth inflows, Chang continued. 

Saxo’s image of a tech-driven business, with an open-architecture model and vigorous culture, is resonating in the market, he said. “We can be relevant for clients as long as they know all these options [that Saxo has] exist.”

A benefit of Saxo’s business model is that while it competes in some ways with private banks, it also can cooperate with them too, for example, giving them a platform they can use for services that would be unappealing to develop in-house, he said. A term – “co-opetition” – a blend of competition and cooperation applies.

“We see private banks as competitors for a share of wallet of the EAMs and their clients. On the other hand, we are also providing private banks the same digital client service architecture to serve their clients. They can leverage that via an AWS-like service where the ongoing cost of access for all these is now  low. It is a game-changer for private banks not having to build and maintain their own capital markets systems and operations to offer a non-differentiated service vs digital online custodians,” Chang said.