Smart age makes a billionaire in 6 years

Two people stand before a billboard advertising a mobile app designed for submitting applications for bank credit. The app was developed by Shenzhen-based ZTE Corp. XIAO XIANG / FOR CHINA DAILY

Since late leader Deng Xiaoping kicked off the country's modernization drive in the late-1970s, China has evolved into a $10 trillion-plus economy with vast sums of household wealth. In 2014, the country's HNWI population grew by 17.5 percent, to 890,000; the elite group's combined wealth came in at $4.5 trillion, according to Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management. Swiss private bank Julius Baer sees HNWI wealth reaching $8.2 trillion by 2020.

Tech entrepreneurs are one of the fastest-growing groups within China's swelling ranks of 1 Percenters. Four of the five richest Chinese are in the tech sector. China's second-richest man isn't an industrialist or property developer. It's Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba Group, a Chinese mashup of EBay and Amazon.com. He was worth $27 billion on Feb 22, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, more than Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing, whose flagship companies CK Hutchison Holdings and Cheung Kong Property Holdings have interests in real estate, ports, and infrastructure.

Private banking in China is a huge market－and a devilishly tough one to crack for a foreign bank. The country's first wave of multimillionaires and billionaires tended to be factory owners and exporters who started businesses in the 1980s and 1990s, when China clocked double-digit growth rates and the export sector boomed.

As a general rule, they've invested their wealth in property and financial assets and prefer to deal with private bankers at local institutions such as China Merchants Bank.

Although some foreign banks－including JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup－have licenses or joint ventures that give them partial access to China's wealth-management market, they don't have the branch footprint and scale of Chinese banks. "They have very, very low market share, largely because they don't have distribution," said Sameer Chishty, a Hong Kong-based partner at Bain & Co, who co-leads the firm's financial services for Greater China and its global wealth-management practice.