Ultra-high net worth (UHNW) families rarely require a single product or service. Their needs may span portfolio management, corporate finance, liquidity, succession planning, custody and family dynamics, often across several jurisdictions and institutions.
For Kelvin Leong, Chief Executive Officer of Merliance Capital, serving this market requires a multidisciplinary team rather than a conventional relationship-management model. The firm has brought together experienced private bankers, asset managers and corporate finance specialists to provide advice shaped around each client’s circumstances.
Merliance operates with a Capital Markets Services (CMS) licence for fund management alongside financial advisory capabilities covering areas including over-the-counter (OTC) securities. Its proposition combines access to banks, brokerage platforms and investment banks with an emphasis on independence, execution and tailored advice.
Key Takeaways
- Experience is central to the proposition: Merliance is assembling senior private bankers, asset managers and corporate finance professionals around the needs of UHNW clients.
- Advice begins with the client rather than the product: The firm does not seek to push a particular fund or structure and will recommend a bank where it is better placed to serve the client.
- Clients require different service models: Some prioritise execution and price, while others need portfolio advice, risk management, succession planning or specialist family guidance.
- Direct issuer relationships can improve execution: Merliance works directly with several structured-product providers rather than routing every transaction through a private bank.
- The firm is developing proprietary investment capabilities: It has established an umbrella structure and launched its first pre-initial public offering (pre-IPO) fund.
- Specialists are brought in where required: External experts support areas such as family dynamics and intergenerational transition.
- Growth will be selective: Leong wants to hire capable professionals with genuine market expertise rather than expand at excessive speed.
- Technology will improve administration, not replace relationships: Automated pricing and data consolidation can reduce delays and errors, but significant wealth decisions will continue to require a competent human adviser.
A Multidisciplinary UHNW Proposition
Merliance Capital was established to serve UHNW clients through a team combining private banking, investment management and corporate finance experience.
Leong believes these disciplines must work together. Portfolio advice alone may be insufficient for an entrepreneur considering a business sale, a family evaluating succession or a client seeking liquidity across private and listed assets.
“To serve an ultra high net worth client properly, you need more than relationship managers,” he says. “You need people who understand investments, private banking and corporate finance, because those requirements often come together.”
The firm’s senior expertise reflects that approach. On the corporate finance side, Leong works with Mark Pawley, formerly chief operating officer for Credit Suisse’s Asia-Pacific investment-banking business, whose experience includes major mergers and acquisitions (M&A), listings and asset transactions. Merliance’s own chief investment officer previously managed more than US$1 billion at Fullerton Fund Management.
Merliance remains relatively small, with five relationship managers at the time of the interview. Leong does not disclose assets under management (AUM), but stresses that the team is deliberately senior.
Its licences allow the firm to provide fund management and advise on a broad range of investments, including OTC securities, as well as establish its own funds.
Listening Before Recommending
Leong sees the relationship manager as the first point of differentiation. Experience matters, but the adviser, firm and client must also share a compatible approach to communication and decision-making.
From there, the process begins with listening.
“We are not here to push a product or sell the client a fund,” Leong says. “We first need to understand the situation and determine whether there is a solution that genuinely fits.”
He is also pragmatic about where that solution should be delivered. Merliance does not assume that independence makes it the correct provider in every case.
“If the bank can serve the client better, the client should continue with the bank,” he says. “Our value exists where independent advice and a more tailored service can produce a better outcome.”
Clients differ significantly in the level of involvement they require. Some are primarily concerned with execution, pricing and efficient platforms. Others want help controlling portfolio drawdowns, improving diversification or selecting investments suited to a particular objective.
At the other end of the spectrum are families concerned with legacy and succession. Their challenges may involve communication between generations, the role of children in the family business and the preservation of entrepreneurial discipline as wealth passes down.
Leong notes that the issues can change as a family moves through successive generations. Some European families are already six or seven generations into wealth, where the challenge may be less about creating capital than preventing future beneficiaries from becoming detached from the entrepreneurial values that originally produced it.
“Every family has a different challenge,” Leong says. “If succession is the concern, our responsibility is to understand the issue and bring in the right specialist rather than force it into a standard investment conversation.”
Merliance works with external professionals where the required expertise does not sit internally, including advisers experienced in family dynamics and intergenerational transition.
Investment Access and Execution
Merliance’s investment proposition accommodates different client preferences rather than imposing a single portfolio model.
For execution-focused clients, the firm can work through brokerage and online platforms offering competitive pricing. For those requiring more advice, the process may involve portfolio construction, risk management, product selection and closer ongoing support.
The firm also works with private banks and other custodians according to the client’s needs.
Structured products form part of the offering, although Leong does not position them as its defining capability. The distinction lies in Merliance’s direct relationships with several issuers, including UBS, SBI and Leonteq.
These arrangements allow the firm to obtain pricing directly from investment-banking desks rather than routing each transaction through a private bank.
“Direct access can improve both pricing and execution,” Leong says. “We do not need to introduce another layer where we already have a relationship with the issuer.”
Merliance has also established an umbrella investment structure and launched its first pre-IPO fund, with plans to introduce additional strategies gradually. These funds may be used by existing clients or offered more broadly where appropriate, but they remain one part of the wider proposition rather than the starting point for every relationship.
Regional Reach
Merliance serves clients across Singapore, Malaysia, Greater China and Vietnam.
Leong previously covered Taiwan and mainland China himself. The firm now has dedicated China expertise through Jack Koo, formerly a Greater China desk head at HSBC, who focuses exclusively on that market for Merliance.
It has also recruited a Singaporean relationship manager who speaks Vietnamese and Thai and has established relationships among wealthy Vietnamese families.
The regional model is based less on opening offices in multiple jurisdictions than on recruiting people with genuine market knowledge and maintaining access to appropriate international partners.
Leong has considered expansion into Dubai but has placed the idea on hold. For the immediate future, he prefers to concentrate on Singapore as the firm’s booking centre while using banking relationships in other markets where they add value.
The firm has, for example, developed relationships with teams from Indosuez Wealth Management and EFG in Monaco, giving it access to specialist international capabilities without establishing another booking office.
“I do not want to expand geographically simply for the sake of having more offices,” Leong says. “The priority is to strengthen the Singapore platform and use the right partners elsewhere when clients need them.”
Key Priorities
Leong identifies three priorities for Merliance.
The first is selective hiring. He does not want the firm to expand at breakneck speed, but to add people with credible client relationships, specialist knowledge and a strong understanding of their respective markets.
“The people make the firm,” he says. “We want individuals who are genuine subject-matter experts, not headcount added simply to make the organisation larger.”
This includes relationship managers with established regional networks, as well as investment advisers, product specialists and fund managers with differentiated capabilities.
The second priority is to deepen Merliance’s Singapore platform. Rather than establish another booking centre prematurely, Leong wants to strengthen the firm’s existing investment, advisory and execution infrastructure while extending its reach through institutional relationships and senior hires.
Singapore will therefore remain the operational centre of the business, even as Merliance serves clients and maintains partnerships across a wider range of markets.
The third priority is to use technology more effectively across the firm.
Merliance is already applying artificial intelligence (AI) in parts of its work, but Leong remains cautious about overstating its role. He sees technology as a means of supporting advisers, improving productivity and reducing operational friction rather than replacing the client relationship.
“You cannot use AI to produce the whole solution,” he says. “Clients still want to speak to an adviser who understands the situation and can take responsibility for the advice.”
Into the Future
Technology has already changed how independent wealth managers obtain information and execute transactions.
Leong recalls a time when structured-product pricing required a trading desk to contact investment banks individually, with responses sometimes taking half a day. Aggregation technology can now produce indicative pricing and direct execution from multiple banks within minutes.
Merliance uses one such aggregator, while dealing directly with selected investment banks where established relationships allow it.
The next major area of development is data consolidation.
External asset managers (EAMs) frequently oversee assets held across several banks and custodians. Producing an accurate consolidated view can therefore require substantial manual work, particularly where statements arrive in different formats.
Leong wants technology to reduce this dependence on spreadsheets and manual data entry.
“We should not have assistants maintaining three Excel sheets and risking a manual error,” he says. “Technology has to consolidate the bank statements accurately and give us a reliable view of the client’s assets.”
He expects automated pricing, reporting and portfolio aggregation to become standard parts of the EAM model. These systems can improve speed, reduce errors and give advisers a clearer view across fragmented holdings.
What they cannot replace, in Leong’s view, is trust between the client and adviser.
“When people are placing serious money, they want to speak to someone competent,” he says. “Technology can support the relationship, but it cannot substitute for the human-to-human part of it.”
Getting Personal with Kelvin Leong
Leong was born and educated in Singapore. He studied business at the National University of Singapore, majoring in finance.
Most of his career has been spent in private banking. He began at UOB before moving to Julius Baer, when it was still operating as a smaller boutique private bank. He subsequently spent close to a decade with LGT and later worked at Standard Chartered.
He eventually decided that it was the right point in his career to begin an entrepreneurial journey.
“We wanted to create something of our own and define how we serve clients,” he says. “Banks need strong internal procedures, but we also wanted the ability to move efficiently and develop more innovative solutions.”
Leong is married and has three children: two daughters aged 20 and 16 and a son aged ten.
Outside financial services, his principal interest is boating. He established a boating company approximately 12 years ago, which has grown into a significant yacht-chartering business in Singapore.
The business is now developing its own yacht brand, Valencia Yachts. Its first model, the Valencia 68, was designed with British yacht designer Bill Dixon and is intended for international distribution.
Away from work and boating, Leong enjoys spending time with his family, particularly watching films together, as well as travelling across Asia for both business and leisure.