The time Sermon Kwan first saw young management trainees rotating through his department, he didn’t really think twice. A junior clerk in a back-office banking job at the time, he assumed they were there to learn about a few of the basic processes and would soon be gone again. The passing encounter, however, was to ultimately prove nothing short of life-changing.

Up to then, after a less-than-stellar academic career, he had just been glad to have a regular income, with no particular ambition other than starring for the department football team and enjoying nights out as a staff club board member.

After dwelling on his meeting with those trainees, though, something struck him like a bolt from the blue. They would all move onwards and upwards. And unless he took immediate action, his own destiny was equally clear: years of routine work and narrowly limited prospects stretching far into the future.

“I asked myself: are they smarter than me or doing something I can’t?” says Kwan, now chief executive of the Bank of Singapore’s Hong Kong branch. “From that point, I started to save up for an air ticket and the first term’s fees at a college in North America, because I realised the first step was to get a good degree.”

Growing up in the 1960s on North Point Estate, where his father ran a small corner store, Kwan’s school record was patchy at best. It featured an early dismissal from P6 when he was “kicked out” at 12 and, later, greater interest in soccer and ping-pong than in classroom activities.

Without the qualifications to get into university in Hong Kong, he applied to a college in Alberta, Canada and did six months there before transferring to the University of Calgary to study accounting. “I was determined to learn as much as I could and not waste a minute, so I signed up for 8am and 6pm classes every day,” he says. “Other than that, friends always knew where to find me – in the library.”

Returning to Hong Kong after four years in Calgary, he went for an accounting job with a small firm, but walked out when they asked him to do a test of basic book-entry skills. “I thought I had taken enough exams by then and, anyway, the job paid very little and was only the level of a junior clerk,” he says.
Instead, he applied to the Bank of America, was accepted as a management trainee, and never looked back. But volunteering to work for the bank’s consumer finance company was a baptism of fire, involving dealing with taxi drivers, handling sales of trucks and construction equipment, and negotiating with the ordinary people and small businesses who make Hong Kong’s economy tick.

“I learned to be more street smart, collecting late payments and dealing with the sort of customers who simply bang their fist on the table if you threaten to take their taxi away,” he says. “Some of them are not so friendly.”

Two months in, the head of credit sent a memo on policy matters, which proved pivotal. Checking the details, Kwan spotted an error, pointed it out and, slightly against expectation, was commended for his efforts. “When you see something is not right, sometimes you just have to speak up and live with the consequences.”

As it turned out, he soon found new opportunities coming his way. The next few years included a stint in commercial lending and, in 1985, a switch to Citibank, first working with manufacturers in Hong Kong and, two years later, heading up the credit department in Toronto.

When Citi started a private banking operation targeting Hongkongers and Taiwanese in Vancouver on the US West Coast, Kwan was an obvious choice. The challenge was finding clients. Many family breadwinners were now back in Asia, but had bought luxury homes in Vancouver. So Kwan hired an intern to check at the land office for any large property sales over C$1 million to anyone with a Chinese name. “We then started sending monthly investment newsletters to these addresses, and information about Citi’s services began spreading by word of mouth. Nowadays, that’s why I tell colleagues don’t just look at basic services and don’t give up.”

A subsequent move to ING in Hong Kong in 2001 offered another chance to build a private banking operation from the ground up, applying a bit more of his personal philosophy. OCBC’s acquisition of ING’s Asian interests in 2010, creating the Bank of Singapore as a fully owned subsidiary, opened up more new possibilities. Kwan’s current priorities include expanding the bank’s mainland footprint, completing the smooth integration of the recently acquired Barclays Asia business, enhancing the product platform, and tapping the NRI (non-resident Indian) and Philippine markets.

“Good teamwork is very important,” says Kwan, who is also the bank’s Greater China region global marketing head. “To that end, I try to be very approachable, to make sure managers are part of the process, and to keep everyone engaged. I encourage suggestions and I’m ready to deal with complaints. I also believe that when your focus is on doing well for clients, growth and revenues will follow.”

BECOMING AN ASSET