Chennai: Multinational bank Standard Chartered is targeting around $1 billion revenue from its private banking initiative in a couple of years.

Over the past 10 weeks the bank has rolled out the private banking initiative in markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Shanghai, Jersey, Seoul and London. The bank will start the service in ten more markets over a period of three years.

Private banking is an advanced form of wealth management service that Standard Chartered offers to very high networth individuals having at least $1 million in investible resources.

According to Standard Chartered Private Bank global head Peter Flavel, in addition to wealth management service our private banking customer will get advice on tax and related matters. Further, the response to a query would be much faster for a private banking customer.

He said, as per some estimates, there are around 9.5 million high networth individuals in the world, out of which three million are in Asia and the Middle East regions, and this number is growing.

Speaking about the market potential, he said, around 40 per cent of high networth individuals have cash as the largest asset class; 80 per cent of the assets are invested on shore and 70 per cent of high networth individuals have less than half of their assets with private banks. Hence we see huge potential for our private banking initiative, Flavel said.

The bank will first tap its wealth management customer base and also would try to extend its corporate banking relationships to private banking. He said the bank''s unique selling proposition is that the advice will be tailored to the regional and individual investment preferences.

Standard Chartered has hired around 150 relationship managers globally for this new service and plans to hire 300 more over a period of time. Each relationship manager will service around 50 high networth individuals, Flavel said.

In India, Standard Chartered is offering private banking services in Mumbai and Delhi with 25 relationship managers. Plans are there to roll out the same in other major cities like Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai. In India, as per one research study, there are about one lakh dollar millionaires and the number is growing at an annual rate of 20 per cent. The bank manages around Rs10,000 crore for its wealth management customers.

While the bank''s private banking wing is headquartered in Singapore, the processing hub for Jersey, Singapore, India, Hong Kong and the UAE markets is housed in Chennai. Standard Chartered''s wholly owned business process outsourcing (BPO) subsidiary Scope International Private Limited will do the processing for the above markets based out of here.

According to chief operating officer, Private Banking, Premod Thomas, the bank chose Scope International based on quality of service, turnaround time and the multi tasking ability of the people.

Initially set up as a cost arbitrage opportunity by offshoring processes, Scope International has evolved into a centre of expertise providing risk controlled process efficiency.

Scope International''s CEO Sreeram Iyer said, annually the BPO processes around 80 million transactions for Standard Chartered.