Hong Kong’s private wealth industry has spent the past two years rebuilding its confidence, and the questions clients ask have shifted with it. At a press lunch hosted by Lombard Odier, Alfred Low, Chief Executive for Hong Kong and Head of North Asia Markets, and Louisa Loo, Head of Wealth Planning for Asia, outlined how the 230-year-old bank is positioning for a resurgent market and a generation of families now more focused on preserving and transferring wealth than simply creating more of it.
Key Takeaways
- A market resurgent: Hong Kong’s economy grew north of 3 percent in the first half of 2026, and the territory has overtaken Switzerland as the largest cross-border wealth centre, with client assets expected to keep compounding over the coming years.
- Preservation over creation: Client priorities have reordered, with wealth preservation and orderly transfer now ahead of the search for the next opportunity.
- Stability as the pitch: With no external debt across 230 years, a Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio of 33 percent and a double-A rating, Lombard Odier positions itself as a vault built to withstand a geopolitical earthquake.
- The succession paradoxes: The firm’s research points to persistent gaps between what families intend and what they implement, with communication the hardest obstacle of all.
- Preparing the next generation: Family governance, cross-border networking and a growing shift toward discretionary management sit at the centre of how the bank works with heirs.
- A partnership model: Privately owned by six managing partners, the firm frames its long-term horizon and alignment as its core differentiator.
Hong Kong Back in Focus
Alfred Low, Chief Executive for Hong Kong and Head of North Asia Markets at Lombard Odier, moved north from Singapore seven months ago, an unusual direction of travel in recent years. Now in his 22nd year in private wealth, he described a territory that has rebounded sharply from the disruption of the pandemic and the market weakness of 2022 and 2023. “Hong Kong is back big time in the last two years,” he said, pointing to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth north of 3 percent in the first half of 2026, deepening stock and bond connectivity with the mainland, and the framing of the next Five-Year Plan.
Yet the world Hong Kong has returned to, Low argued, is not the one it left. “The old world order that was written by the US for the last 80 years is no more,” he said, adding that a new order would take years to settle. That backdrop has reshaped what clients want. Where the dominant question three years ago was where the next opportunity lay and how to make more money, he said, the priority now is “how do I preserve wealth and pass it on to the next generation”.
A Case for Stability
That shift plays to a message Lombard Odier has long emphasised. Celebrating 230 years of heritage, the bank will also mark four decades in Hong Kong in 2027, a span that Low said has taken it through more than 40 financial crises. It holds over USD400 billion in client assets, reports a CET1 ratio of 33 percent and carries a double-A rating.
For Low, the more telling figure is the absence of external debt. “Should the next major financial crisis shake out, where is the bank vault that you know is going to be safe?” he asked, arguing that a balance sheet without borrowings is a rare form of security when government finances are stretched. He likened the structure to sashimono, the Japanese joinery technique that holds timber together without nails so a building can flex rather than snap in an earthquake. External debt, he suggested, is the steel that fails when markets freeze.
Stability, he added, is also a matter of people. The median tenure of the Hong Kong team runs beyond 10 years, and the average banker carries more than 20 years of experience, continuity he described as essential when guiding clients through an uncertain period.
The Succession Paradoxes
If preservation is the new priority, Louisa Loo, Head of Wealth Planning for Asia, said the industry’s own data shows how far intention outruns action. She noted that Hong Kong had overtaken Switzerland as the largest cross-border centre, holding USD2.95 trillion in assets at the end of 2025 against Switzerland’s USD2.94 trillion, while the number of single family offices in the territory had reached 3,384, a 25 percent rise over two years.
Against that growth, Loo set out several paradoxes drawn from the firm’s recent study of high-net-worth investors in the region. The first is a gap between intention and implementation: while roughly three quarters of respondents cited wealth preservation as a primary goal, only about a quarter had a well-structured succession plan, and around half had none at all. Delay, she said, often stems from families’ lack of urgency. They might prefer to wait to consolidate a business or sell a property first, or to wait for their Next Gen to decide their future residence first. All these leave them exposed when the unexpected arrives.
A second gap concerns readiness. With about 40 percent of families reporting heirs living overseas, only around a quarter of the next generation fully understood the inheritance tax rules that could apply to global assets. A third tension sits between tradition and modernity, as founders hesitate to modernise systems and risk losing touch with younger relatives.
The most important, Loo said, is communication. More than a third of parents found succession difficult to discuss, and the cost of that silence is measurable: family alignment on goals reached 87.5 percent among advised families against 57.8 percent among those without advisers, yet only 13.2 percent had received guidance on family governance and conflict resolution. “It really takes time,” she said of building a governance framework, noting that drafting a family charter and constitution typically takes at least more than a year.
Preparing the Next Generation
Both speakers returned to the question of heirs. Loo said the firm connects next-generation clients across regions rather than within a single market, inviting families from Europe and Asia to broaden their perspectives and networks, and supplements large gatherings with bespoke sessions for individual families. Its Geneva-based governance and philanthropy teams travel to families wherever they are based, with clients supported by a deep bench of wealth planning specialists covering areas such as family governance and succession planning.
Low framed the challenge as shared across generations. Founders worry whether their children are ready, he said, while the children ask the same of themselves. Networking, discretionary solutions and a grounding in how risk and volatility are managed all help close that gap before responsibility passes over.
Volatility is also nudging clients toward delegation. Loo said shorter market cycles had made more families receptive to discretionary portfolio management (DPM) rather than trading tactically on their own. Low said that at the start of the year more than a third of the firm’s assets sat in discretionary mandates, a proportion he expects to be higher than at most peers.
Reading the Markets
On positioning, Low was candid about the house view. “We are positive on China, we’re overweight China,” he said, noting the firm had moved from neutral to overweight two months earlier, drawn by strength in areas such as solar, electric vehicles, batteries, robotics and artificial intelligence even as property and traditional manufacturing struggle.
On rates, the firm sits apart from consensus. Against market expectations of tightening from the Federal Reserve, Low said the house view is that there will be no hikes this year, and possibly none until the middle of 2027, with no cut anticipated either. That thesis rests partly on oil, which he expects to average around USD79 to USD80 a barrel over the coming year. The firm has held a pro-risk stance and approaches unpredictable events through structured scenario planning rather than forecasting single outcomes.
Taiwan, a market Low visits frequently, offered a vivid example of the wealth being created regionally, with an economy that expanded 8.8 percent last year and an equity market up 50 percent this year. That concentration, he cautioned, is precisely why clients need to diversify onto a broader base.
A Partnership, Not a Client Book
Underpinning the pitch is the firm’s ownership. “Our clients are not clients,” Low said, explaining that the bank is owned and run by six managing partners whose own family wealth sits largely within it, aligning their interests with those they serve. Being privately held, he argued, frees the firm from quarter-to-quarter pressure and allows planning measured in decades, an advantage when some relationships already span five generations.
He closed with a story from the archive. In 1851, the firm advised clients to go overweight and invest in an emerging market: the United States. That long lens, he suggested, is what a family should look for when deciding where wealth will be safest through the storms ahead.