We provide you with the platform for you to move the world. It was Archimedes who said: ‘Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world’.

We are a platform for the wealth management industry. It is a platform based on collaboration; not competition. It may sound trite; and competitors may not believe it. Let me try to explain.

We see ourselves as providing the pickaxes and shovels in a gold rush. Asia is growing rich. Every man and his dog is trying to set up a family office. The Wealth Management Institute (WMI) is probably the most credible organisation in Asia trying to build capacity in the wealth management industry. WMI has the backing of GIC; Temasek; EDB & MAS. Plus a USD 25 million donation from Ray Dalio. How can Portcullis contribute?

For 40 years, we have painstakingly built up a CSP (Corporate services provider); a Trust services provider; Fund Administration and Law Firm. We grew up as a law firm of over 60 lawyers; but today we have metamorphosed into a trust company of about 300 people. The law firm (less than 10 lawyers today; the others have become trust officers) is no threat to other law firms; because we are like an in-house legal department. I tell my lawyers that they can only draft one legal document at a time; but they can supervise 10 at same time; better to outsource the drafting to other bigger law firms. That is what I mean by collaboration.

We are a one-stop-shop. It is very tedious repeating yourself to bureaucratic compliance officers across multiple organisations. In Taiwan, we service the big four accounting firms. In Singapore, there are now many single family offices; the decision-making is kept to a small coterie of family members within their own Private Trust Company; but they outsource the mundane compliance grunt work and calculating of the NAV of their investments to us. Although we have a CMS Licence for fund management, we could never replace their trusted CIO, gatekeeper or chamberlain; we merely provide the services they outsource. In HK, we likewise have Type 4 & 9 licences for fund management; but we are there to collaborate with & service the single family offices there.

Singapore & Hong Kong have become very expensive places to do business in; that is the reason we have moved our back office for Singapore & Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur. Not to India; nor the Philippines. Because in Kuala Lumpur many of our colleagues speak English; Cantonese; Hokkien; Mandarin; Bahasa Malaysia or Indonesia & Hindi.

We have also moved our IT Development to KL, because the world’s biggest trust companies use a piece of software that is developed near KL. There are plenty of IT engineers in KL.

Microsoft has announced a USD 2.2 billion investment to advance new cloud and AI infrastructure in Malaysia.

The bulk of our compliance back office also sits in KL. ACAMS are training many local talents in Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorism Financing there.

We now have the economies of scale and a comprehensive platform for private banks; fund managers & family offices, which are too small (in the Asian time zone) to have the critical mass to provide many of the services they require. We are one of the largest plug-and-play platforms in Asia.