In a wealth management industry where fund platforms have proliferated, analytical tools are widely available, and product access has been largely democratised, the question of what genuinely differentiates one advisory firm from another has never been more pressing. For firms that serve sophisticated, cross-border clients with complex commercial lives, the answer increasingly lies not in what they can offer from a product shelf but in the problems they are prepared to solve.
At the recent Hubbis Investment Forum – Hong Kong 2026, the opening panel discussion examined whether the city’s resurgence as the world’s largest cross-border wealth hub represents a lasting structural shift and how firms can convert that momentum into sustainable growth. Dr. Nick Xiao, Founder and CEO of Annum Capital, offered a candid and at times provocative account of how the nature of client demand is changing, why conventional advisory models are struggling to keep pace, and what it takes to remain relevant when the old playbooks no longer hold.
Key Takeaways
Client requests are becoming more complex and commercially driven, moving well beyond portfolio construction into areas such as fundraising, cross-border structuring, and regulatory navigation.
Product access and investment analysis have been commoditised to the point where they no longer represent meaningful competitive advantages for advisory firms.
The defining skill for wealth managers and family offices is now problem solving and the ability to exercise judgement in situations where no standard template exists.
Clients are seeking to balance safety and growth simultaneously, rather than retreating entirely into defensive positioning despite a highly uncertain environment.
Proprietary investment capabilities, such as in-house custom indices, can offer a differentiated growth proposition in a market where conventional approaches increasingly produce homogeneous outcomes.
A Different Kind of Brief
Xiao set the tone for his contribution with a live case study that illustrated how far client expectations have moved from the traditional wealth management conversation. Rather than approaching Annum Capital with a request for portfolio management or asset allocation advice, a client arrived with an altogether different problem: raising USD50 million to support the acquisition of a small logistics company in mainland China.
“Can you imagine that?” Xiao said. “That’s not the typical request from a high-net-worth client.” The conventional response, he noted, might have been to redirect the client to a corporate advisory team or an investment bank. Instead, Annum Capital was able to construct a solution that drew on multiple capabilities, launching a fund to access institutional capital, using a Qualified Foreign Limited Partner (QFLP) conduit to channel investment into a mainland vehicle, and navigating the employee share option structures that straddled both offshore and onshore Chinese tax regimes.
The point, Xiao suggested, was not the technical complexity itself but what it revealed about the gap between what clients now need and what many advisory firms are set up to deliver. Clients at this level are not simply looking for returns on existing wealth. They are building, acquiring, and restructuring businesses across borders, and they expect their wealth adviser to understand that broader commercial context.
The Adviser as Navigator
Xiao extended the argument with a second example, this time touching on the sensitive area of regulatory and tax disclosure. Without elaborating on the specifics, he described the challenge of guiding clients through situations where difficult questions arise around transparency and compliance, and where the consequences of a misstep can be significant.
His firm’s role in those moments, Xiao explained, is not to provide tax or legal advice directly but to ensure clients are connected to the right specialists who can guide them through the process with care and precision. “We are not in a position to offer any advice on taxation, but we know the right people who can handhold the clients through the difficult times,” he said.
The underlying message was that the advisory relationship, at its most valuable, functions as a navigational one. Clients facing complex, high-stakes situations need an adviser who can remain calm, exercise discretion, and coordinate the right expertise at the right moment. That capability, Xiao argued, is far harder to replicate than product access.
He made the point with characteristic directness. “Product access is tap water, analysis is tap water,” Xiao said. “The really important thing is problem solving and the judgmental cause. And we, as one industry, that’s our ultimate calling.”
A participant on the panel reinforced the point from a different angle, observing that private bankers can no longer succeed as product promoters and that the modern relationship manager needs to be solutions-driven and able to coordinate expertise across multiple disciplines to meet each client’s full set of needs.
Balancing Paranoia and Ambition
When the conversation turned to the most pressing challenges facing clients today, Xiao resisted the framing that uncertainty should lead to purely defensive positioning. The number one priority for clients, he argued, is not retreating into a fortress but finding a way to balance safety and growth at the same time.
Annum Capital’s own structure reflects that philosophy. On the safety side, the firm operates an external asset manager platform with booking relationships across banks in Geneva, Hong Kong, Singapore, Monaco, and elsewhere, giving clients geographic diversification and custodial optionality. On the growth side, Xiao described a more distinctive capability. In an environment where passive investing through exchange-traded funds has become the efficient default, Annum Capital has built proprietary, in-house equity indices listed on Bloomberg. “We are the only family office in Asia with in-house equity index on Bloomberg,” he noted.
The ambition behind that investment is to offer clients a differentiated growth proposition in a market where conventional tools increasingly produce the same outcomes. Xiao drew the parallel explicitly, observing that when everyone is asking the same artificial intelligence tools the same questions and receiving largely the same answers, the scope for genuine differentiation narrows. The firms and advisers that can think independently, access unconventional opportunities, and exercise judgement in asymmetric situations are the ones that will stand apart.
“How to balance paranoia, that’s human nature, and growth and success and winning, that’s human ego,” Xiao said. “I think that’s the ultimate test and a trick of our trade.”
The Judgement Premium
Xiao’s remarks offered a window into a segment of the wealth management market that operates at the intersection of private banking, family office advisory, and cross-border commercial problem solving. It is a space where standardised models struggle, where the value of an adviser is measured not by the products they can access but by the judgement they can exercise, and where the ability to structure bespoke solutions across jurisdictions and regulatory regimes is the true differentiator.
For Annum Capital, Xiao’s argument is that as product access and analytical tools become more widely available, differentiation shifts towards how advisers apply them: understanding unusual problems, exercising judgement and bringing together the right capabilities while helping clients balance protection with growth. In a market where, as Xiao put it, the conventional ingredients have become tap water, the value lies in what the adviser brings to the table that no platform can replicate.