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Together with existing offices in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Bahrain office will serve clients who are demanding a more sophisticated range of financial instruments to help them meet their wealth management needs and goals.
"Backed by more than 50 years of Citigroup history in the Middle East, the private bank is growing its local presence in the region. The offices in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bahrain are staffed by a pool of experienced bankers and specialists, many of them with substantial experience in serving the region's high net worth individuals," said Akbar Shah, Head, Citigroup Global Wealth Management in the Middle East.
"Our business in the Gulf region has grown steadily since we opened our first office in Dubai in 2004. To properly build on our business momentum, it was critically important for us to establish a presence in Bahrain, which is one of the most developed of the financial centres in the Gulf region."
Mark Morgan, Managing Director and Chief Officer of Citigroup Global Wealth Management in the Middle East, said: "Our unique strategy of developing a robust onshore private banking platform to match Citigroup's global product offerings will allow CPB to meet the increasingly complex needs of our Middle East clients and capture a larger slice of the emerging wealth management market in the region."
"Our client-banker ratio is relatively small compared to other providers. A banker serves 20 to 30 clients at most, and often much lesser. This enables us to deliver a unique brand of private banking where there is a high degree of customer contact and customisation in our advice and solutions," he said.
Industry data shows that the Middle East was the fastest growing region in the world last year in terms of wealth creation, with assets under management expanding by nearly one-third to reach USD 1 trillion. The number of high net worth individuals (those with at least USD 1 million in net assets) in the Middle East rose by one-tenth to 300,000.
The Citigroup Private Bank believes that both AUM and the number of HNWIs in the Middle East will grow annually in double-digit percentage terms in the short to medium term.
Individuals with a minimum net worth of USD10 million form CPB's target market.
Posted by Anne-Birte Stensgaard, Senior News Editor
