Cosmos Bank Taiwan (萬泰銀行) opened its NT$35 million (US$1.1 million) VIP wealth management center at Taipei 101 yesterday, vowing to double its number of high-income clients within one year.
"We hope to boost the percentage of our VIP customers from the current 5 percent to 10 percent this year," chief managing director Jim Slavic said. "The wealth management market in Taiwan is a vast, fast-growing market and we are very optimistic."
Cosmos chairman Simon Williams told an opening ceremony that the bank would continue to expand its wealth management centers across the country, hoping to attract clients with deposits valued at more than NT$10 million.
The Boston Consulting Group's global wealth market-sizing database showed that 210,000 households, or 2.9 percent of total households in Taiwan, had deposits of more than US$1 million. Taiwan ranks No. 6 globally for percentage of millionaire households and No. 8 for the total number of millionaire households.
Williams said Cosmos was also looking for targets for mergers and acquisitions.
"We have no plans to increase branches except through mergers and acquisition in the future," Williams said. "But in the short term we will upgrade [63] branches and wealth management centers to provide unique, tailor-made services to meet the needs of our VIP customers."
Although the cash card business remains its primary source of revenue, Cosmos intends to speed up growth in its three other business divisions: wealth management, small-and-medium enterprises banking and credit cards, Williams said.
Hit by the cash card default crisis in 2005 and 2006, Cosmos completed a recapitalization of NT$42 billion last year, resulting in an 81.7 percent fully diluted ownership by SAC PCG and GE Money.
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