Deborah Ho has been snapped up as Barclays Capital’s head of senior relationship management (SRM) for Southeast Asia, the bank said in a statement yesterday. It’s a new position at the UK-based lender, but is consistent with Barclays' model in other parts of the world.
Ho was previously chief executive officer of DBS Asset Management in Singapore where she led the team in the sale of the business to Nikko Asset Management in October last year. Since then, she has been a free agent.
Ho took up her new Singapore appointment on Monday. She is responsible for delivering Barclays' entire product suite to the bank’s most senior clients throughout the region. These range from chief investment officers at leading fund managers to heads of multinational companies and family offices. The emphasis is on cementing key relationships and coordinating approaches from investment and corporate banking specialists.
She reports to Kirk Sweeney, head of SRM for Asia-Pacific, who is based in Hong Kong. Sweeny joined Barclays in January 2010 after running Lehman Brothers’ entire operations in Hong Kong and later heading up Asia-Pacific fixed-income sales for Nomura.
Sweeny said in the statement that Ho “brings a proven track record of business development and strategic success. Along with her functional and regional partners, she will drive the growth of our Asia-Pacific franchise and our global strategy of delivering differentiated capabilities in content, capital and solutions to our clients”.
Ho has more than 25 years of experience in financial institutions in Asia and New York. In addition to DBS, she has held senior jobs at UBS and J.P. Morgan, and also worked at Wardley, Credit Suisse and Citibank. AsianInvestor last year named her as one of the region's 25 Most Influential Women in Asset Management.
Ho’s “client skills and business expertise position her well to lead the continued development of the client proposition in Asia-Pacific”, said Quek Suan Kiat, Barclays’ Singapore country manager.
The appointment follows a raft of other regional hires across Barclays’ businesses in Asia-Pacific. These include Anne Luke as head of client solutions for the bank’s wealth management division in August 2011, and the poaching of well-regarded analysts from Morgan Stanley and Nomura in October in order to bolster its equity research effort.
