"We are in growth mode for funds services in Asia": Citi's Cheeping Yap

Yap, Citi's new head of fund services, aims to expand Citi's fund services to China and Korea, and change some systems.

Name: Cheeping Yap

Bank: Citigroup

Position: Head of Fund Services for Asia ex Australia

ABF: What makes you excited about your new position?
The growth opportunities in market in Asia as a whole and the unique position that Citi has in each of the local markets in Asia to leverage and implement a business model that can help us to growth and improve our competitiveness in the market through deploying a global solution with local market characteristics.

ABF: What three goals are you focused on?

• Expanding our fund services into new key markets in Asia, e.g. China and Korea.
• Maintaining our global fund solution with local market characteristics. We had not opted for local system solution in these markets where our strategy is to build around local requirement on our core offering.
• Building product and service consistency across disparate markets in Asia.

ABF: What will you do differently in this position?
Leveraging global platform to develop local market characteristics is where we differentiate significant among our global competition where our competition is either lack footprint in Asia where they service Asia out of 1-2 hubs, e.g. HK or Singapore, or they adopt a local system infrastructure for each local markets. A second priority is to develop a “one citi” approach to integrate various resources within Citigroup to develop best of breed services to clients, e.g. ETF services in a joint effort with Citi Global Markets.

ABF: What changes are you planning for?

• Strengthening local fund services team to differentiate our regional fund services with local requirement, reinforcing “global solution with local characteristics”, strengthen local team to enable us to demonstrate deeper local fund services expertise.
• Hire a regional Head of fiduciary services to help manage risk and also strengthen our fiduciary services offering in the region.

ABF: What are your key business philosophies?

• Be a true partner to client to help client grow and expand. The partnership must be beyond operation but holistically cover end to end process to help client to grow.
• Leverage “one Citi”
• Empower the countries to differentiate and build world class fund services business’

ABF: What previous positions prepared you for this one and how?
Transformed the largest fund services business in Asia, Hong Kong.

ABF: Anything else you'd like to add?
Despite challenging market out there, we are in growth mode on fund services business in Asia. It is a great position to be in.