'One Bank' strategy pursues ultra-rich
Banks are ramping up their “One Bank” strategy as competition for ultra-rich clients intensifies, with lenders racing to monetise relationships beyond traditional private banking.
The One Bank solution refers to banks pitching clients a full stack of solutions, from wealth management to financing advisory.
They typically do this through a team of specialised bankers who work across both wealth and investment banking divisions. Citi’s head of integrated client engagement Dawn Nordberg, for example, sits on the bank’s investment banking floor in New York, even though her team belongs to and works under head of wealth Andy Sieg.
The move is apparent in Asia – one of the fastest growing wealth regions in the world, as banks compete to bank the richest.
Standard Chartered became the latest to join the fray after it hired ex-UBS banker Raza Jafree in February to lead a “new partnership between the bank's corporate and investment banking and wealth and retail banking businesses” to provide relevant CIB services to single family offices and high-net-worth clients.
“We haven’t had this model before, so we’re putting together a team to demonstrate to our private banking clients the range of solutions we can offer,” said Sharad Desai, global head of sales and structuring at Standard Chartered, whom Jafree reports to.
The One Bank strategy has been adopted by nearly all banks in Asia which have investment banking and wealth management business, though they may use different names for it. Team sizes also differ across firms. Standard Chartered’s new team is 10 strong, while Deutsche Bank and Citi said they could not give definitive headcounts as teams collaborate across business lines and geographies.
Rising wealth, complex demands
The idea to build a specialised One Bank team came from banks noticing that their high-net-worth clients are increasingly demanding more than investment services or portfolio management as global wealth continues to grow.
Private wealth in Asia is projected to reach US$99trn by 2029, accounting for a quarter of the global total, up from 21% in 2025, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group. Bankers noted that most of their high-net-worth clients in Asia are also founders and chairs of global businesses.
A clear indicator of Asia’s growing wealth is the rising number of family offices being set up, particularly in Hong Kong and Singapore. But often, these family offices want more than the “standard wealth management offering”, said Philip von Danwitz, global head of One Bank Solutions and head of European mid-cap private M&A at Deutsche Bank.
“Our clients are becoming more and more sophisticated and more institutional and want institutional services which we typically serve in collaboration with our investment bank,” he said.
Vice versa, clients from investment banking arms are also increasingly seeking wealth management services as their businesses and wealth grow.
Citi’s Nordberg said that client referrals from investment, commercial and corporate banking to wealth doubled in 2025 – its integrated client solutions team's first full year in business – resulting in “several billion in net new assets” for Citi’s wealth business.
Driving deals
Teams are usually made up of a mix of bankers from both wealth management and corporate and investment banking. Banks either hire staff with experience in both, or make internal moves to build up teams.
Banks say the approach is already translating into dealflow and fee generation.
Amid a slower bond market at the start of the year, Citi was able turn one of its private banking clients – who owns a Hong Kong-based real estate business – into an investment banking client by helping the business owner print a high-yield bond through an introduction to the bank’s debt capital markets team.
Standard Chartered’s two-month-old team led by Jafree said it has a pipeline of global deals near completion, ranging from loans to project financing.
On the wealth side, Deutsche Bank is also onboarding a new client who came from a referral through its corporate and investment banking team. This comes after the bank acted as a sell-side adviser for the client in a sale of one of his businesses. His covering banker thereafter recommended that he bank the sale proceeds with its wealth management arm.
The value of the deals were not disclosed, but bankers agreed that even a small piece of the pie from wealthy clients with sizable business interests can generate a steady source of revenue.
Challenges
Wealthy clients demanding more from their banks is not new, but banks have for years struggled to provide an all-access solution even with the implementation of One Bank.
Challenges include helping relationship managers, who specialise in wealth management, understand the multi-faceted spread of solutions that banks provide, as well as incentivising them to cross-sell other divisions' products and services since it does not fall under their primary job scope.
Some banks incentivise bankers to cross-refer clients by giving them a cut of a deal’s commission, while others encourage this by building it into staff performance reviews.
“There is also the indirect incentive of you getting a prospect to do business with another part of the bank, and that prospect then becoming a [private wealth] client,” said Shivani Bhargava, managing director of the One Bank Solutions at Deutsche Bank.
She cited an example where the bank lent over US$500m to a prospective wealth client with a loan covenant to maintain additional collateral of over US$1bn in assets – which the client maintained with the bank’s wealth management arm even after the transaction.
Since last year, Deutsche Bank has also held regular “RM forums” where high-profile RMs with key clients are invited to share best practices and discuss case studies to help bankers familiarise themselves with the firm’s offerings.
Private bankers who cross-refer their clients to other divisions also face risks because they do not know how the cross-referral would potentially affect the bank’s relationship with the client. A mishandled financing transaction could cause them to leave the bank.
“We are the originators, but ultimately the deals are being executed in partnership with the investment bank,” said Bhargava.
“But at Deutsche, we collaborate well and that’s why it’s working,” she said.
As competition for wealth clients intensifies, banks that can align incentives across divisions will likely capture a larger share of fees and profit, while others risk leaving revenue untapped.
“What we get to deliver in partnership with the rest of the firm creates opportunity. There’s US$5trn of assets held away from us and our existing clients and we’re excited to go capitalise that,” said Citi’s Nordberg.