Deng Mengying Meritswater Shanshui Family Office Co-Founder Hongye Wealth General Manager
As a senior practitioner in the wealth management industry, Deng Mengying is actually very young.
Her ideas about wealth management come from mature overseas markets. And the 11 years she has been in China's wealth management industry are the stage of ups and downs and grass in this industry.
It is conceivable that those mature market concepts will meet the reality of China's industry.
She has studied in three countries, worked as an investment banker, and helped with family businesses. She is a typical second-generation woman in a Chinese family business, and she has also encountered the problem of whether to succeed. In the end, she chose to go the path she liked.
In 2011, she set up a department in her father's business and began to engage in wealth management; in 2015, she founded Hongye Wealth, a tripartite wealth institution; in 2021, she co-founded Meritswater with two overseas financial institutions, landing in Singapore to serve ultra-high net worth individuals.
She pays special attention to the overseas assets segment of her clients. It's her specialty, or she thinks it's her strength. In addition to overseas asset allocation, it also includes inheritance and overseas education.
As a practitioner, she naturally pays attention to the movements of her clients. When talking about the epidemic, Sino-US relations, and the views and choices of China's high-net-worth individuals overseas in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, she said that what is now present is a clear K - some people are closed to themselves and prefer assets and children to be at home; while others seem to have the opposite attitude.
On April 8, Beijing time, I connected shenzhen from Toronto and had a conversation with Deng Mengying. This is also one of the series of dialogues of "Chinese Family Wealth" and "Chinese Family Running a Line".
1. Why Singapore
Wang Xiaobo: What kind of opportunities prompted you to embark on the road of starting a business in the field of wealth management?
Deng Mengying:
I grew up in Shenzhen since I was a child, and then I studied abroad, and the whole path is very similar to many post-80s and post-90s.
After I graduated, I worked at an investment bank overseas, and later my parents wanted me to come back. I am an only daughter at home and have a family business at home. My father actually wished I could come back and help him do something, maybe in the long run, and hopefully that I would be able to take over the family's business.
My father's company was industrial, and then slowly turned to some entity investment, but it was still inseparable from industry. I came back at that time and the positioning was not very clear, mainly to go with him to see some projects and do auxiliary work. Later, by chance, my father had a good friend who was doing wealth management in Hong Kong, and when he came to Shenzhen, he also hoped to be able to cooperate with our company. So I had the opportunity to talk to my father's friend about wealth management. At that time, I thought it was a very interesting thing, and it was related to my profession. I felt that doing business, including taking over my father's class, might not be particularly suitable for me. I wanted to say I could go out of my own way.
Wang Xiaobo: Do your experiences of going out to study abroad and working as an investment bank have anything to do with the choice you made later?
Deng Mengying:
I think it's related. I remember attending an event at the time. It was an exchange meeting for some entrepreneurs at home and abroad, including the financial industry and industry. At the dinner table, next to me sat a Hong kong man of about sixty or seventy years old. After we exchanged business cards, I asked him what you do? He said I do wealth management. And then I asked you how many customers you had? He said we only had one customer. Originally, he was doing a family office, but at that time, there was no concept of family office in China. He said that they were helping this client in making a global investment in some assets, including the primary market and the secondary market, and talked to me a lot. I realized that the top of wealth management was the family office, which also gave me an inspiration at that time, and I hoped that in the future, I might develop on this path.
Wang Xiaobo: What kind of idea is it for building a good water home office in Singapore? Why Singapore?
Deng Mengying:
I think Singapore is a hub in Asia in terms of wealth management, inclusive, and a lot of financial policies are also very friendly.
At present, ShanshuiJia Office mainly serves ultra-high net worth customers, and the main part of the customers is the entrepreneurs we have accumulated for a long time. In addition, there are some upstarts in science and technology and some second-generation families. Some are from the mainland, some are from Hong Kong, and some are from Singapore, all of whom are Chinese customers.
The main axis of ShanshuiJia Office is to help customers do asset management, and the current management of customer assets is about 400 million US dollars. We hope that on this basis, we can fully serve some of the needs of customers.
The idea of the future is still to be a small and beautiful boutique organization, because the home office has no way to serve a particularly large number of customers. We also hope that after long-term service, we can let long-term followers of us, including customers with similar value concepts, be able to have better asset management on our platform, as well as peripheral services.
2. The market is awe-inspiring
Wang Xiaobo: Since 2011, you have been in the wealth management industry for 11 years, is this road difficult?
Deng Mengying:
I think of course it's hard, any startup is hard. In fact, these 11 years have also experienced different cycles, as well as various small or large fluctuations.
I'm very thankful that we're still alive and can focus on my own ideas, ideas, and output them to my customers, rather than following the crowd. It's not what the customer wants to do, we follow his route, or we turn into a pure product sales organization because we need to make more profits.
I think that in the process of starting a business, we must maintain a very firm belief in order to go long. I've also seen a lot of different wealth institutions up and down. Some institutions may make a lot of money in the beginning of gold, a very large team, we may be relatively conservative, relatively stable. But now, I think it's important to focus on the customer, for the sake of the customer, and many customers have followed us for many years, so that we can do it for a long time.
Wang Xiaobo: In the years since you started your business, you have also experienced a reshuffle in the domestic wealth management industry. What was your experience and perception?
Deng Mengying:
In fact, my personal philosophy has always been the role of a wealth advisor, to help clients choose different asset classes from a buyer's point of view.
In the beginning, we were a small third party and didn't have a huge number of customers. Probably because my own idea has always been to be a small and sophisticated organization, serving some specific groups of people, so that we don't have a sales team, we don't say that we will continue to sell any product.
Maybe as a girl, I myself belong to the kind of more conservative and cautious, and after doing so many years, I will become more and more conservative. After experiencing a lot and seeing the ups and downs of the industry, I feel more and more that finance needs to be feared, and the market is worthy of awe. Customer trust is very difficult to build, but it can collapse in an instant.
Deng Mengying and Jim Rogers
3. It is very difficult to charge customers
Wang Xiaobo: As a tripartite institution, your income model is actually to take commissions from the product side?
Deng Mengying:
Right. In fact, what I have always hoped to do is to charge from the perspective of consulting, including our home office, and hope that in the future, it will be based on the real buyer's investment to collect the customer's consulting and management fees.
But in (20) 15 or 16 years, I don't think the market and customers have yet reached such a level of cognition. Don't say that at that time, even now we have not really become buyer investors.
We also have constant communication among our peers. I feel that any more mature institution hopes to be able to serve customers from a professional point of view, from the perspective of consulting payment. Time is becoming more and more precious, and these consultations we give to our clients are actually valuable, but I think this may be something that needs to be promoted with customers for a long time.
Wang Xiaobo: How long do you think it will take for the buyer to pay?
Deng Mengying:
I can't fully confirm it, but I think it will be at least 5 years. And I think it's also a different type of agency. For example, like my own wealth management company, different customers have different needs, if the customer needs to do a single insurance allocation, or a single investment allocation, when we first let us do it, it is actually difficult to charge fees.
But from the perspective of home office, what we hope to be able to do in the future may be to put some ultra-high net worth customers who we think are very valuable, and recognize our concept of asset allocation, we charge a certain fee. On the one hand, it can precipitate customers and increase customer stickiness; on the other hand, many of our scarce resources are valuable. But if it is valuable, we can charge for some consultation.
Overall, I would find this thing very difficult. If you want to do it, after 5 years, you can only do such a thing in a relatively small number of ultra-high net customers.
4. Customers are constantly educated by the market
Wang Xiaobo: You have served so many customers, how do you view the risk awareness of domestic high-net-worth individuals?
Deng Mengying:
I think the risk-conscious chinese are getting stronger. Many clients pay more attention to risk when they talk to me. For example, tax planning, compliance planning, and family asset inheritance have also slowly been put on the agenda.
It used to be that we were going to instill these ideas in our clients, but now the clients themselves have such ideas. 10 years ago, we talked to our clients about asset isolation and asset preservation, which was actually very hazy. At that time, the economy was very good, covering up a lot of risk factors, but in the past 5 years, the Chinese market has undergone a lot of changes, many companies have also had problems, and I think the ideology of many customers has also changed a lot. Customers are constantly being educated by investors and are constantly being educated by the market.
Wang Xiaobo: Judging from your observation, is the phenomenon of the rich generation still very prominent?
Deng Mengying:
From the current market point of view, it may be a more prominent problem for the rich in stages, especially in Guangdong. Many entrepreneurs (clans) who do business may not be able to pick up when they take over, and many problems will occur. Including some companies founded in the past 10 years, some of them have also had big ups and downs, which may be short-lived. In my opinion, a lot of it is a lack of awareness of asset preservation and awareness of asset isolation.
I can give an example from around me. There was a boss who was in business, and then he came into contact with small loans, and he began to transform into finance, and the transformation did not turn into, and finally the business was risky, and he went in. He belongs to a very typical stage of the rich. There are many such examples.
In fact, the business he started was very stable, but because the boss did not have a particularly strong sense of risk, he went to carry out a transformation and hoped to get rich. At that time, it was very profitable to do finance and do loans, maybe he made money in one year, and the money he earned on the entity for 5 years.
Wang Xiaobo: What kind of portrait do you want your ideal customers to be?
Deng Mengying:
In fact, customers are not saying that we take the initiative to choose. I hope that through our continuous service and continuous education, we can enable customers to have a relatively long-term concept and long-term planning.
Because it is a professional service, of course I hope that clients can realize that professional people do professional things. We must help our customers configure them from the perspective of their families, and we hope that our customers' wealth goals are in the same direction as ours.
In addition, some customers are more self-aware and know what they need. The client can set a goal for himself, and we can have a direction to help him achieve it.
- The End -
Written by Wang Xiaobo