Wealth managers jobs in crisis?

SINGAPORE: Can the wealthy trust their wealth managers any more after losing 30 to 60% of their wealth during the current global financial crisis? The world's top banks including brands like Morgan Stanley, UBS, Barclays and Standard Chartered operating in Asia are desperately struggling to find a suitable answer to this question.
It is interesting to see the usually suave and self-confident community of private bankers looking dazed and fearful of survival.There is already a run on deposits with some of Asia's wealthy pulling out money from accounts of private banks. The future looks dismal. Some of the world's top banks have either gone bust or merged with others to stave off closure.
"Professional advisers have failed to prove their worth," Peter Flavel, senior managing director of Standard Chartered Private Bank told a conference of wealth managers in Singapore on Friday. "The players have changed in a way that was unimaginable a few months back. They will continue to change," he said. The conference hall filled with the world's major private bankers practicing in Asia echoed with sentiments ranging from self-whipping, fear about their own futures as trusted wealth managers and wide-spread lamentation over the sinking industry situation after decades of strong growth. "Things are not going to be the same again," moaned Joseph Field, senior international partner with New York based law firm, Withers Bergman, which specialises in the legal side of wealth preservation industry.
Players like Su Shan Tan, Morgan Stanley's head of private wealth management for Southeast Asia and Australia, Didier Von Daeniken, the Asia Pacific chief for Barclays wealth management unit and Justin Ong, partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers, were unanimous that the industry must quickly learn its lessons from the crisis and find ways to reassure customers.
They spoke as if someone has put locks on the rapid-fire tongues that had the world of the rich in awe with talk about complex structured and leveraged investments reaping big profits. Wealth industry players are now talking about the need to be transparent about investment decisions and servicing clients instead of showing off their skills in playing around with complex products.
"The image of large banks has been tarnished. A lot of changes are going to happen now. Fees will come down. There will be more transparency on how fees are charged to clients." John Evans of Private Banker International, which organised the conference said. He predicted that a lot of hedge funds will merge with private banks in order to survive while smaller players will find business from clients unhappy with the big banks.
The fears go beyond worry which bank will survive and which one will close down. The financial crisis has challenged the very premises on which the global wealth management industry has achieved compound annual growth rate exceeding 10% over the past two decades. Asian markets have seen annual growth of 20-25% in recent years.