After strong double-digit growth in BNP Paribas Wealth Management’s Hong Kong business in 2024, Lemuel Lee looks to expand operations across China as the firm makes “decoding the China wealth mosaic” a top priority for 2025. With steady growth in early 2025, APB Rising Star of the Year Lee is aiming to replicate the success of last year.

The first step toward this goal came after Lee, head of BNP Paribas WM Hong Kong, refreshed the Greater China coverage strategy. This plan, revived since last year, aims to use a new perspective to better understand the entire China market. “Our North Asia business is clearly driven by China. That’s true not just for us, but for everyone,” Lee said.

He explained that Chinese demographics have changed, with wealth now flowing from all over China. Given this shift, the bank felt it was necessary to align its China coverage more closely with industry players to best position the business for growth.

“China is still the heart of growing wealth, regardless of what the others see. With that in mind, I don’t think the old way of how we covered China, where we have one market that covered China, works,” Lee said.

“There are still trillions in wealth opportunities to capture offshore, and the biggest question for us is how to decode the China wealth mosaic. Because it’s fragmented.”

“If you generalise China, you’re not going to do well”

A new structure of GC coverage

As part of the new China strategy, all former China or Hong Kong market heads under the Hong Kong site have been re-designated as “Greater China market heads,” including Alexis Wu, Martin Loh, Janet Chan, and Luke Chiu. While their core mandates remain unchanged, going into different parts of China is now a priority.

Following the restructuring plan, the first step for Lee was to outline the “regional strategy”, which included a detailed plan for his market heads to penetrate every corner of the wealth market within China: North, South, East and West.

In his view, China’s regions each specialise in distinct industries and client segments, so the approach to China coverage should extend beyond clients in top-tier cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

“If you generalise China, you’re not going to do well. You have to understand China just like everyone understands [the difference] between the West and the East Coast of the US. As a bank, we need to understand the cultural sensitivity, and then we can see how to apply the regional strategy,” he explained.

He shared the example that, “If you go to Sichuan and Chongqing now, not many people will understand the concept of family office, whereas if you tell clients in Shanghai about it, they are on it already.”

Localisation of talents

Tackling the entire demographic spectrum across China cannot be done with just a small team of 20 bankers, Lee explained.

“We have over 100 bankers covering North Asia, and we have over two-thirds of them overseeing the China coverage now,” he said. To ensure that more bankers can fully cover Chinese clients, the bank is encouraging more North Asian bankers to self-declare their background, dialects they can speak, and the sectors they can cover.

“We are not going to send a Hong Kong-born banker to Xi’an, we prefer someone who truly understands the local culture and industry,” he explained. Under that initiative, he said, it’s easier for the bank to identify the right bankers to cover different demographics.

BNP Paribas WM’s Hong Kong site has been on a hiring spree over the past two years. A significant hire that Lee has made this year is Alexis Wu, a former executive at China Merchant Bank, who now serves as one of the Greater China market heads.

Looking ahead, Lee said the next step in the strategy is to localise talent by hiring Chinese bankers with onshore experience to deepen the firm’s penetration in China. He shared that his market is on track to grow front office staff by a net of 15-20% by the end of the year. BNP Paribas WM in Asia had 205 RMs in 2024, up 1% YoY, according to APB Insights. Assets under management grew 14.1% to US$91.6 billion in 2024.

Unlocking mutual benefits through onshore partnerships

Is BNP Paribas late in the China market game? Lee pointed out, many may not realise, but the French bank has a long history in Hong Kong as well as China. The French giant has been in Hong Kong for 162 years and in China for 165 years.

A few examples demonstrating BNP Paribas’s footprint in China include its WM joint venture with the Agricultural Bank of China, a 19% stake in Bank of Nanjing, BNP Paribas Cardif – its insurance arm, a joint venture with Bank of Beijing, and the presence of BNP Paribas Corporate and Institutional Banking in China.

“There are a lot of questions about ‘What’s BNP Paribas’ commitment to China after COVID?’ But there’s the French way of doing things – we don’t market them a lot. Not to mention, a lot of the deals were only struck in recent years. We are going big on China,” Lee said.

Now that he’s delving deeper into the China landscape, he said he’s also spending more time meeting with key stakeholders from both BNP Paribas’s partners in China and internal leaders in the region. The goal, according to Lee, is to “fully leverage and unlock mutual benefits through onshore partnerships.”

“Every organisation has their right timing to get into different businesses. If we look back at how we invest in China, I think our timing is very good,” Lee said.

Apart from its core businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore, BNP Paribas is also strengthening its presence in onshore Taiwan and Thailand. “For us, the timing is right based on our planning because there’s only so much investment money every year we can do.”