Battle for your wealth

For Mui Cher, a third-generation leader of her family’s import-export business, disciplined saving had long been her way of building wealth.

But as the cost of living rose, money sitting idle in her bank account no longer felt like it was keeping pace. That pressure is familiar to many Singaporeans, whatever the size of their savings.

This prompted her to start investing. As a customer of DBS Treasures, DBS Bank’s wealth management service for the affluent, she has a dedicated relationship manager who walks her through a broad range of investment products. She now invests across different risk levels, with her relationship manager helping her navigate the choices.

Mui Cher, who is in her 30s, is the kind of customer that Singapore’s banks are increasingly fighting to win as they extend their services further down the wealth ladder to reach the mass affluent – professionals and entrepreneurs with money to invest, even if these people have yet to join the millionaires’ club.

The banks are chasing a pool of money that keeps growing. Singapore households’ combined net worth rose 7.3% year on year to $3.3 trillion at the end of 2025, according to the Singapore Department of Statistics.

Combined household wealth continued to grow in the first half of 2026, reaching $3.4 trillion by the end of June.

Together, the households held $714 billion in cash and deposits as at June 2026, up 5% from a year earlier. This excludes wealth held in property, Central Provident Fund savings, life insurance, stocks and other investments.

More money has been pouring into the banking system. Total deposits grew 7.6% year on year in June 2026, according to data from DBS and economic database CEIC. Most of that growth came from residents, while non-residents contributed 2.3 percentage points.

Part of the wealth arriving from abroad belongs to the world’s wealthiest families. The number of single-family offices awarded tax incentives by the Monetary Authority of Singapore grew from about 400 in 2020 to more than 2,000 in 2025.

Savings that pile up in deposits are what banks want to convert into invested, fee-earning assets.

Banks sort their customers by one number: how much they can invest. Cross a threshold and you may get a dedicated banker or better rates, or be offered products that ordinary retail customers cannot buy.

At the top of the ladder, banking goes far beyond accounts and investment portfolios, according to private bankers from the three local banks – DBS, OCBC Bank and UOB – as well as foreign institutions such as UBS, Julius Baer, JPMorgan and Citi.

Relationship managers for the ultra-rich often act as fixers, advisers and family confidants, and they are expected to handle affairs with discretion.

For example, when an elderly head honcho of one of Asia’s multinational conglomerates realised that his passport had been left behind in Berlin hours before an international flight, his private banker moved swiftly – arranging for the document to be retrieved and delivered to Frankfurt within a day, salvaging his travel plans and meetings to seal a multimillion-dollar deal.

For another client, the request was less urgent but no less exacting: to have a newly cultivated orchid in Singapore formally named after his wife – an honour typically reserved for visiting dignitaries such as the late Princess Diana and former US president Barack Obama.

The process involved careful coordination, from selecting the orchid to registering the hybrid with Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society, the only world authority for orchid registration.

Such requests are rare, even among the ultra-rich, but they show how far banks will go to keep their most valuable clients.

For the banks, the wealthy have become a vital source of earnings.

As interest rates fell in 2025 and lending margins narrowed, wealth management helped keep profits near record levels for the three local banks.

An estimated $77 billion in new money flowed into the three local banks in 2025, thanks to Singapore’s safe-haven appeal and supportive policies for setting up family offices and trusts.

Wealth management scoreboard 2025

With growing assets under management, their wealth income also jumped year on year in 2025. And the momentum remains strong in 2026.

The banks are reinvesting much of their windfall in the battle.

After years of downsizing their physical presence, both local and foreign banks have been reimagining their bricks-and-mortar footprint, turning branches built for routine transactions into lavish sanctuaries designed to captivate high-net-worth clients.

Citi, for example, shut its last transactional branch in Jurong East on Oct 12, 2024. The American bank now runs three wealth management centres, including a posh four-storey building spanning 30,000 sq ft in Orchard Road, serving Citigold and Citigold private clients.

Standard Chartered Bank, too, has refreshed its branches in recent years. It now has five priority banking centres and an international banking and priority private centre at Ngee Ann City, dedicated to serving clients with cross-border and more sophisticated needs.

Among the local banks, OCBC’s Wisma Atria branch boasts a bookstore, retail spaces and a cafe, making visits to the bank less transactional. UOB operates five privilege banking centres and two private bank suites in Singapore, while DBS is set to add two new wealth centres to its three existing ones by the end of 2027.

Some banks have also rolled out native AI apps to offer 24/7 personalised advisory and recommendations to their wealthy clients.

In July, OCBC unveiled Wendy and Wayne – two AI avatars modelled on actual employees – to engage a select group of premier private clients with round-the-clock wealth management insights.

This follows Citi’s launch of Citi Sky for US-based Citigold clients in April. Integrated directly into the Citi mobile app, the agentic artificial intelligence platform features an avatar that clients can interact with.

And, of course, the fight for top-tier wealth management talent has never been fiercer.

DBS wants to hire 600 more front-line advisers, including relationship managers and investment counsellors, as well as more platform engineers across its six key markets by 2028.

OCBC is set to employ 600 relationship managers over the next three years for its consumer banking business. UOB, too, is expanding its wealth advisory teams, with plans to double its sales team by the end of 2026.

StanChart plans to hire around 50 private bankers to serve the ultra-rich, and more relationship managers for its priority customers.

While HSBC is planning job cuts in its UK wealth management business, according to some reports, the bank in July pledged to hire more than 100 AI specialists and 100 wealth managers to beef up its Singapore business.

The banks are all geared up to win you over. Are you ready to climb the wealth ladder?