Private-banking growth stories in Asia are usually told as city rivalries. The more useful cut is which client corridor is actually moving the P&L. Deutsche Bank’s emerging-markets private bank has put Hong Kong at the front of its 2026 growth ranking within that mandate, according to public comments this week from the executive who covers Greater China, South-east Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
Marco Pagliara, head of emerging markets at Deutsche Bank Private Bank:
“It’s been probably the best performing region.”
On the nature of the activity:
“You’ve seen a fair amount of action, especially around trophy real estate in Hong Kong. Typically, there is a Chinese flavour to that.”
Those lines land against a familiar policy backdrop: tighter mainland scrutiny of outbound wealth and tax treatment, and a standing debate over whether Hong Kong’s offshore role would fade. The bank’s description of its own book does not settle that debate for the market as a whole. It does say that, inside one global private bank’s emerging-markets complex, Hong Kong is still the growth leader and mainland-linked demand is still showing up in high-value real assets and related activity.
Pagliara also pointed to broader strength across transactions, lending against physical assets and real estate, and investment opportunities in the city. South-east Asia, with Singapore as a major hub for the franchise, was described as expanding and trailing just behind Greater China for the year, with Singapore and Indonesia the largest centres in that slice by revenue and assets. The bank has hired more than 30 private bankers across emerging-markets teams so far in 2026, with headcount still rising on a net basis. It does not publish a regional AUM split for the private bank.
Group ambition remains a wealth AUM target above €1 trillion by 2028. The June figure including retail bank was €846 billion. Those numbers frame capacity. They do not by themselves explain the Hong Kong ranking.
For a head of DPM or a private-bank CIO the product read is concrete. A corridor that is active in trophy real estate and asset-backed lending pulls different inventory than a pure securities-based advisory book: liquidity events, leverage, concentration risk, and cross-border structuring. A corridor that is “trailing close behind” in South-east Asia still needs coverage depth in Singapore and Indonesia. Staffing more than 30 RMs across EM teams is a signal that the bank is buying coverage, not only waiting for markets to lift AUM.
The proprietary frame is not “Hong Kong is back.” It is that mainland-linked UHNW activity can remain the growth engine of a foreign private bank’s EM book even while outbound policy noise continues. Product and credit committees should map exposure to that corridor explicitly rather than average it into a single Asia weight.