Who's part of The Club 2009?

When we set out to compile our inaugural list of 50 masters of Asian finance, we knew we'd given ourselves a difficult task. Asia is home to a number of highly regarded finance professionals and we understood when we initiated this exercise that singling out just 50 was a huge challenge.

We started by canvassing the opinions of our readers -- we ran a poll on our website for a fortnight in September asking for nominations of people who had defined Asian financial markets during the recent past. We received a number of interesting candidates and some people even nominated themselves -- something we have no problem with. If you're good, we don't expect you to hide your light under a bushel.

We then proceeded to canvas finance professionals -- this is where our Rolodexes came in handy. We spoke to folks who are part of the industry and those who have left it behind. We sought feedback across levels, from associates to managing directors. We made careful note of what we heard from people's colleagues -- often it is those on the inside who really know who is doing what. Equally important was the opinion of peers -- commanding respect in a highly competitive industry like banking is not easy.

Our list does not focus on one type of finance professional -- rather it seeks to identify those who have made any kind of substantial contribution to the finance industry in Asia over the past few years. So it spans investment bankers and commercial bankers, product specialists and relationship managers, regulators, private equity investors and economists. It even includes a lawyer.

We were impressed at how often we heard the word teamwork. Some people on our list declined to be on it when they heard, via the grapevine, that they were under consideration. Others refused to share photographs. In most instances this was because people said they did not want to be singled out as their achievements are due to the efforts of a team -- this was the mantra at Goldman Sachs in particular, so it's perhaps no surprise that it ended up with only two names on the list. We would add that leading a team well and commanding the respect of your team, to our mind, still deserves credit. And we went ahead and still included many of those who expressed discomfort at being on our list.

We think the sudden fit of modesty also owes something to timing. This is not the best year to be named as a rainmaker or the man trading billions of dollars of paper at an investment bank. Investment banking is under fire as never before, leaving a question mark on whether compensation practices in the industry will survive unscathed. The fallout in Asia has been less than in the West, but it's still a good time to be low profile. The recent financial crisis caused a great deal of flux in the industry. A number of seasoned Asia bankers got caught in the crossfire and had to leave the firms where they had built up businesses. Kudos to some of them for landing on their feet in new positions. But this created a problem for us with some of our nominees who have vacated their corner offices but not yet created anything comparable in their new roles. As our list seeks to identify people currently in positions of power and influence in Asia, we had to leave many of them out.

In a similar vein, we declined to include people who have built financial institutions, then recently hung up their shoes. The institutions they leave behind bear their stamp, but no longer their guiding hand. In some cases their successors are too new to their jobs for us to include them in the list this year as they have not yet rightfully earned a place. This was especially true in India this year. Please exercise your right to vote next year, when we launch the 2010 poll.