Citi Private Bank creates Asia-Pacific managed-investment sales role

Reflecting a trend by global wealth-management firms to bring senior staff to Asia, Citi Private Bank will move Manav Abrol from Geneva to Singapore later this month to run the investment advisory and sales team for South Asia.

He replaces Jennifer Tay, who will remain in Singapore in a newly created post as head of the managed investment product sales team for Asia-Pacific. Her coverage will include mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity and real estate.

The new role has been established to put a greater focus on managed-investment sales in the region, says Debashish Dutta Gupta, Citi’s Asia-Pacific head of investments for the wealth-management business.

Abrol and Tay will both report to Dutta Gupta, while Tay will also report to David Baillin, global head of managed investments at Citi Private Bank in New York.

Tay has been with Citi PB since 1997. Prior to her current role, she was a portfolio counsellor focusing on the Indonesian market and head of discretionary products management for the private bank for Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. Before joining the private bank, she had been with Citi’s global corporate and institutional bank since 1994. She has also worked for Standard Chartered and OCBC.

Abrol has worked at Citi Private Bank for six years, most recently as head of the investment advisory and sales (IAS) business in Switzerland, where he managed a team covering UK offshore, Central and Eastern Europe, Greece, Africa and Turkey.

The IAS team provides asset-allocation advice to clients across asset classes including equities, fixed income, currencies and commodities. It also provides capital-markets services, and services using external managers in long-only equities and fixed income, hedge funds and private equity.

Other senior private bankers to have relocated to Asia in recent months include Andrew Cohen and Douglas Wurth for JP Morgan, Nancie Dupier for HSBC and Nick Cringle for RBS Coutts.