‘Singapore cannot afford to keep losing clients to Dubai and Hong Kong’: Industry says faster onboarding vital for wealth hub edge

[SINGAPORE] As the battle for Asia’s ultra-rich gets more heated, Singapore is moving to sharpen its edge as a leading wealth hub by tackling a growing pain point among wealthy clients and family offices: lengthy onboarding processes.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is moving to slash private bank account opening times for ultra-high-net-worth clients to under a month.

The push comes as rival financial centres such as Hong Kong are stepping up efforts for a bigger slice of the wealth pie amid rising global uncertainty.

Industry participants have welcomed this initiative as one that will strengthen Singapore’s appeal to wealthy clients, while also maintaining its reputation as a trusted financial centre.

The competitive pressures are growing, as Boston Consulting Group found that Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth hub. Singapore came in third in the report.

“Singapore cannot afford to keep losing clients to Dubai and Hong Kong because the first thing they encounter is an initial bundle of know-your-customer (KYC) documents requested by private banks that bears no relationship to their actual risk profile,” said Bryan Keasberry, Asia-Pacific head of market development at Fenergo.

“Our own research shows that a very high proportion of banks, including in Singapore, are losing clients because onboarding is slow and inefficient,” he added.

“That is a problem if you are trying to grow your franchise.”

Fenergo is a digital solutions provider for financial institutions. Its 2025 Financial Crime Industry Trends report found that 76 per cent of Singaporean banks said they had lost clients due to slow or inefficient onboarding.

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In comparison, that proportion was 65 per cent among their US counterparts, and 72 per cent among UK banks.

Keasberry also noted that geopolitical uncertainties have fuelled interest among the wealthy to open accounts in Singapore, putting more pressure on private banks’ onboarding and KYC teams.

“We have seen longer onboarding timelines over the past few years, particularly after the heightened regulatory scrutiny following various anti-money laundering (AML)-related cases globally and in Singapore,” said Ryan Lin, director of Bayfront Law.

These days, opening a private banking account can take about six months, he added.

In a recent circular, MAS flagged the importance of wealth establishment processes that are risk-proportionate, so that Singapore’s AML regime “does not create undue burden on legitimate businesses and investors”.

The move is aimed at improving efficiency rather than lowering standards.

As part of efforts on this front, the Private Banking Industry Group has committed to enhancing client onboarding practices. It aims to reduce account opening times for most clients to within one month by end-2026.

Why onboarding takes so long

Industry participants pointed out that the most time-intensive elements of the onboarding process are typically the collection and corroboration of the client’s source of wealth.

This is especially so in cases where the wealth was generated from different activities and over an extended period.

Lillian Liao, market executive for Singapore and Malaysia and head of Asia South investment counsellors at Citi Private Bank, said: “The key challenge comes from the unavailability of direct (source of wealth) corroboration evidence due to the passage of time, such as salary statements and investment transaction statements from decades ago.”

She added that the bank would then have to deploy alternative approaches for source of wealth corroboration, such as conducting research on industry benchmarking to assess the reasonableness and plausibility of the client’s source of wealth holistically.

For more sophisticated wealth structures – particularly those requiring MAS approvals such as Section 13O fund structures – clients will also typically be onboarded by regulated private banks and other licensed intermediaries, said Bayfront Law’s Lin.

Section 13O fund structures apply to Singapore-incorporated companies managed by a Singapore fund manager, with assets under management of at least S$20 million in designated investments, based on MAS qualifying criteria.

In those situations, he said, there is an additional layer of scrutiny through the compliance, AML and source-of-funds reviews conducted.

To combat such delays, financial institutions are turning to advanced technology and agentic artificial intelligence.

For instance, Citi is exploring the use of AI to improve KYC processes related to source of wealth procedures, said Liao.

This includes AI-driven solutions for drafting source of wealth narratives, extracting information from open sources, performing plausibility assessments of declared income and wealth flows, as well as evaluating the internal consistency and reasonableness of the client profile.

The Bank of Singapore introduced agentic AI into its KYC processes last year, said Jacky Ang, global chief operating officer of the private bank.

This was a move away from using AI as an assistant and towards utilising the technology to execute tasks within governed boundaries.

Tasks that once took up to 10 days can now be completed in about an hour, “significantly” reducing manual effort and enabling a more seamless customer onboarding and review experience, he noted.

But he added that the technology does not replace human oversight.

“Relationship managers and compliance teams retain responsibility for judgment and final approval,” he said.

Balancing speed and compliance

Industry participants said that banks should focus on efficiency rather than just hiring more, and must separate genuinely high-risk cases from mainstream clients and process them differently.

“Speed and compliance can go hand in hand when processes are designed properly,” noted Keasberry.

“The banks that get this right use technology to cut out duplication, so clients aren’t asked for the same information again and again, while maintaining a clear audit trail to show regulators why certain decisions were made.”

Lin highlighted that Singapore remains compelling because of its political stability, strong rule of law and robust financial ecosystem.

This is important because high-net-worth individuals and family offices are comparing jurisdictions very carefully for political stability, regulatory certainty, strong legal institutions and reputable financial counterparties, he said.

“Based on initial feedback from clients, they are celebrating the (MAS) circular and touting the same as one step in the right direction to increase the efficacy of setting up wealth structures in Singapore,” he added.

“In my view, MAS is not relaxing AML standards but is reminding financial institutions to avoid adopting overly rigid or one-size-fits-all processes which may create unnecessary friction for legitimate investors and businesses.”

Industry participants also agreed that the directive serves as a wake-up call, as players vie for a larger share of global wealth.

As Keasberry put it: “If onboarding feels harder here than in other hubs, clients will notice.”