Banks shift deposit strategy from rates to relationships

Wealth management is a key focus.

Banks in Asia and Southeast Asia are focused on deepening customer relationships and improving experience, rather than just rates, as banks globally rethink deposit management.

Deposit rates amongst banks in Singapore and Malaysia have eased over the past few months, with less generous promotional rates, said Silvio Struebi, managing partner at Simon-Kucher for Hong Kong, China, and Singapore.

Banks in the region are instead moving from price to proposition, and to offering better value and better engagement, Struebi said.

“The key focus really in the market is around wealth, so with affluent or private banking segments of the retail banks, because there you can win higher tickets. And I would say almost every retail bank in the region has a dedicated strategy to win the customers,” he said in a podcast hosted by the consulting firm.

Banks in Asia have recently ramped up wealth management propositions. Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB) is reportedly aiming to increase the proportion of its invested wealth management-related assets to 50% going into 2026.

Citibank Singapore saw its digital wealth management transactions rise 165% times in the last two years after revamping its mobile app and website and launching more than a hundred features to its wealth products, a bank executive told Asian Banking & Finance in an interview earlier in 2025.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Bank, meanwhile, opened new wealth management centres throughout the city throughout 2025. Singapore’s DBS Private Bank launched a bespoke private asset solution for its ultra-high net worth (UHNW) and family office clients.

Southeast Asian banks are both optimising pricing and ‘cleaning up’ deposits by tightening terms for early redemption or deposit breaks, for example, said Struebi.

“Then optimizing the volume tiers is also an area that frequently comes up because the constructs may have been built years ago,” Struebi said, adding that changes here usually enable “quick wins that we can realize relatively fast.”

In privilege banking and wealth management, Asian lenders usually have tiered offers or categories, he added.

“And also here, typically there is a suboptimal structure that we can address, how the pricing is set across these different segments,” Struebi said.