By CONRAD TAN

Barclays Wealth plans 'aggressive' expansion in Singapore and the rest of Asia, its chief executive said this week.

Tom Kalaris, global CEO of the private banking arm of British bank Barclays, told BT that a major thrust of the bank's strategy to gain market share is to offer services and products that are normally available only to large corporate clients of investment banks or wealthy individuals.

'We don't think anyone has done that well,' he said. 'We call that the 'private investment banking' world - we think that's the sweet spot of the industry.'

Since many of the rich people in Asia that private banks hope to attract as clients have made their fortunes from starting and managing their own businesses, they are often familiar with the services and products that investment banks offer them as corporate clients. What Barclays Wealth plans to do, Mr Kalaris said, is to offer a similar range and quality of products to such people as individuals.

'Markets in Singapore and the rest of Asia are driven by entrepreneurs,' he said. 'They get used to the kind of products and the calibre of people they deal with in investment banking, and they expect to have that same sophistication of product and coverage from the wealth management side.

'What they want is the same quality of research and ideas in asset allocation and execution, and the same breadth of product, as they would get if they were operating as a public company.

'When you make that pitch to a wealthy businessman, that resonates.'

The fallout from the financial crisis, which has hit many private banks hard, offers a 'once-in- a-generation opportunity' to redefine the wealth management industry, Mr Kalaris believes.

As investors nursing losses from the plunge in asset values over the past year re-examine their existing private banking relationships, he hopes that the latest strategy would attract more rich people to bank with Barclays Wealth.

'We see a major change in the landscape - clients re-looking all their wealth managers - and we think there's a new proposition here, this concept of institutional-quality product and service, and we think the entrepreneurial market particularly in Asia and Singapore is ripe for this approach,' he said.

Barclays Wealth employs some 7,500 people worldwide and manages about &pound145 billion (S$344 billion) in assets, but does not break down the numbers by region.

Of the 7,500 staff, 'roughly 1,650 are client-facing people', Mr Kalaris said.

One reason that the bank is moving so aggressively now is that he believes the window of greatest opportunity to attract some of the wealthy people moving their assets from one bank to another will be relatively short, lasting at most until 2010.

Already, investors are moving some of their cash holdings back into riskier assets, he added, noting the recent rally in the stock market.

'If you took all the assets that moved from risky assets to cash over the last year, I think about 15 per cent of the assets have moved back from cash into risk,' he said. 'There's another 85 per cent to go, and I think by the end of this year, you'll probably have that number at about 50 per cent.

'So we're hiring, adding technology and expanding our business through this environment, because our bet is that this will be one of the few opportunities that we will get to build rapidly with the calibre of people and to gain the sort of market share that you can in these sorts of downturns.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.