Ida Liu, the new CEO of HSBC’s private bank, had just wrapped up a full schedule of client meetings when she sat down with me at the HSBC Global Investment Summit in Hong Kong.
“How many client meetings have I had here already?” she asked me, rhetorically. “That’s why I’m here, right? At the end of the day, it’s really about that personal engagement.”
Liu is just three months into her role leading HSBC’s private banking division, joining the U.K. bank in January. The private bank manages $566 billion in invested assets and customer deposits. Before that, she spent 18 years at Citi, where she built relations with media and fashion billionaires, as well as Asia’s wealthy. She was one of Citi’s seniormost women before her departure. Our conversation was one of the first she’d had with a reporter since taking the role at HSBC.
“There was really only one bank I would have considered,” she told me when I asked her why she made the switch. “My background is Chinese, and there’s a cultural background and DNA that was very aligned with HSBC.”
HSBC executives have made Asian wealth management a priority for the bank, and focused especially on Hong Kong, which is on track to surpass Switzerland as the world’s largest wealth hub by 2027. HSBC snapped up Citi’s wealth management business in China in 2024, and fully privatized Hang Seng Bank, one of Hong Kong’s oldest financial institutions, earlier this year; it’s also been shaving non-core businesses, such as retail banking in markets like France and Sri Lanka.
“We’re in the middle of the largest wealth transfer in history,” Liu told me. McKinsey estimates that $100 trillion in wealth will pass to the next generation over the next few decades—and by 2030, 40% of investable wealth will be controlled by women.
She says she’s “thrilled” to see senior women leaders “taking the helm,” particularly in Hong Kong. A 2024 Deloitte report estimated that around 9% of Hong Kong-based CEOs were women, higher than the global average (6.0%), the U.S. average (6.6%), and the Asian average (5.3%). Other Asian jurisdictions that beat the U.S. are mainland China, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan.
But Liu points out that only a small percentage of Fortune 500 companies have CEOs of Asian descent—and even fewer of East Asian descent, specifically. “I have a double ceiling: the glass ceiling on one side and the bamboo ceiling on the other,” she told me. “We’re chipping away at the glass ceiling. But when it comes to the bamboo ceiling, there’s still a lot of work to do.”
I raised a question that had been nagging at me—one I’d noticed while putting together our Most Powerful Women Asia rankings. A striking number of the women leading major Asian companies are daughters of founders. It can be easy to dismiss that as a lesser path to gender diversity—but is it possible, instead, to see it as a viable way to get the ball rolling across Asia?
“Whatever opportunities people have, whether it’s through business succession or you work your way up in different organizations—they’re both respectable” she answered. “We just need more female CEOs, and more Asian female representation.”
Nicholas Gordon
nicholas.gordon@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
AMD's stock soared to a record high on Friday. And not even due to any news out of the chipmaker led by Lisa Su (No. 4 on last year's Most Powerful Women list). Instead, it was because of rival Intel, whose earnings showed growing demand for CPUs. Analysts expect that to translate to other big makers of CPUs.
Oprah is moving to Amazon. Her video podcast will go twice-weekly—and Amazon will build out a universe around Oprah's Favorite Things, book club, and content from 25 seasons of her talk show. It's similar to the deal Amazon struck with the Kelce brothers to build fandom around their podcast New Heights, which was valued around $100 million.
Canva goes all in on "AI 2.0." Canva has been incorporating AI features into its platform for years, but some didn't land well with users. The company—the highest-valued female-founded and -led startup in the world—is trying again, becoming an "AI platform with design tools" rather than a "design platform with AI tools." The company, led by Melanie Perkins, ended last year with 265 million monthly users and $5.6 billion in annual revenue.
SiriusXM is in merger talks with iHeartRadio. After completing a spinoff into an independent company, SiriusXM became a Fortune 500 company for the first time in 2025. That year, I wrote about the company and CEO Jennifer Witz's efforts to modernize beyond satellite radio for the streaming era. But it's still tough out there in the radio business. A Sirius-iHeart merger would combine the largest satellite radio service with the largest radio station owner in the U.S.
Some companies are cutting parental leave. At Zoom, parental leave is down from 22 to 24 weeks down to 18 weeks, and 10 weeks instead of 16 for non-birthing parents. Deloitte is reportedly planning similar cuts.
ON MY RADAR
Zara Larsson's pop career had stalled. But a big second act waited NYT
Adjoa Andoh on Shakespeare, Bridgerton, and DEI: ‘I don’t have to be the only one in the room’ Guardian
Eric Swalwell, Tony Gonzales, and the post-post-#MeToo era NYT
PARTING WORDS
"I see my cancer as a gift—an extra lease on life. After that, anything that was not truly important just melted away."
— Rita Wilson, reflecting on her life in the Guardian
