Standard Chartered bets on Hong Kong as it raises long-term earnings goals

Standard Chartered has raised its 2030 earnings target to 18 per cent by expanding wealth, cross-border banking and digital businesses, with Hong Kong at the centre of its growth story, according to global CEO Bill Winters. Investors welcomed the plan, lifting the lender’s shares 2.5 per cent to HK$201.60 in Tuesday’s morning session, outperforming the benchmark Hang Seng Index, which rose 0.4 per cent. The London-headquartered lender, which focuses on emerging markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is aiming for a 15 per cent return on tangible equity in 2028 and 18 per cent in 2030, up from 11.9 per cent in 2025. Growth will be driven by wealth and cross-border business, alongside a 15 per cent cut in back-office headcount through automation by 2030. Winters unveiled the new targets at a media briefing on Tuesday morning ahead of an investor event in Hong Kong, describing the city as “extremely important” and a “key growth driver” in Standard Chartered’s strategy. “Hong Kong is our home market. It is our biggest market and fastest-growing market,” he said. “Standard Chartered is a superconnector, connecting our clients of 55 markets to each other, and Hong Kong is at the centre of a lot of that network flow and wealth flows.” Winters added that Hong Kong was no longer just a gateway to and from mainland China, but now played a bigger role in global trade and capital flows between Asia, Europe and Africa. The investor event this week, co-organised by Standard Chartered and HSBC, brought about 50 global fund managers and other institutional investors to Hong Kong for presentations and social activities from Tuesday to Thursday. It was the second such event since 2023, when the city reopened after the Covid-19 outbreak. Geopolitical tensions, particularly the conflict in the Middle East, had prompted investors to diversify, with Hong Kong seen as a safe harbour, Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po said last month. Standard Chartered hosted its presentation at its soon-to-open wealth centre in Causeway Bay, its seventh in the city, underscoring its expansion in wealth management. The bank said it was accelerating its target of US$200 billion in net new money for its wealth business to 2028, from 2029 previously. It also expected fee income to account for more than half of total income in coming years, up from 47 per cent now and less than 40 per cent a decade ago. Winters said the shift was designed to generate more fee income and drive growth, as interest income remained flat in a low-rate environment. He said the bank planned to adopt artificial intelligence and automation to reduce back-office staff worldwide by 15 per cent by 2030, cutting its cost-income ratio to 57 per cent in 2028 from 63 per cent in 2025. “We do have job role reductions in favour of the machines, and that will accelerate as we go full-bore into AI,” Winters said. “It is not cost-cutting, but it is replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital that we are putting in.” He added that affected staff would be offered re-skilling training or packages to pursue other opportunities, with the bank targeting a 20 per cent increase in income per employee by 2028.