One of the most influential women in wealth management and planning in Hong Kong almost never made it. After a career switch from social services to advisory work with financial services giant Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas, when Schwab shut down its Austin office, she took a gamble on a job in Tokyo as an advisor to Americans overseas. They didn’t tell her they were trying to sell the company, and had no work visa for her, let alone relocation support.

“I had no idea really what that meant, and probably didn’t do enough due diligence, but I accepted that role and moved to Tokyo at the beginning of 2003 to work for a very small, independent wealth firm,” Cutrera says. I was not aware of what I’d been hired to do, or really anything about my role. It was very much starting from scratch, to build a client base, to build vendor relationships, to set up the terms of business and to carve out what exactly my work was going to be, since they didn’t have anything predefined. 

 In 2007, Cutrera moved to Hong Kong to set up EXS Capital with former Citigroup banker Eric Solberg, buying him out in 2016 as part of a merger that formed Leo Wealth. She hit a sweet spot, as Hong Kong began a concerted push to attract family offices, that saw Hong Kong overtake Singapore in the number of single-family offices as well as a 24% increase in the number of hedge fund managers, private equity managers and family offices by mid-2024.

It is on track to have more than 3,000 family offices in 2025, and is expected to become the world’s largest cross-border wealth management hub between 2027 and 2028 according to Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu. 

Q. What does Leo Wealth do for its clients? Do you still work with American expats? 

A. There is a strong American tilt to our client base, but expat is the wrong word because a lot of our clients are very long-term Asian families who have US citizenship or green cards. Our typical client is not the temporary three-year assignment expat. Our clients tend to be international, cross-border Asian families. One spouse is American, one spouse may be Asian, British, Australian or others. The nexus of why people come to us is our competency in cross-border planning, with expertise across a variety of jurisdictions and the ability to plan on a holistic basis. 

Our vision is about combining our three core areas of work and delivering that combination in the best way possible. We have a tax practice, a wealth consultancy, and investment practice. The wealth management practice is everything from estate planning and financial planning to advice around issues, whether related to things like divorce, family offices, charitable giving, philanthropy or family governance. All that falls under the planning bucket.

Q. What makes you different from other wealth advisory firms?

A. While we have families who may only use one aspect of what we do, most of the clients we work with are using us for multiple areas. They use us because they want a holistic view of all aspects of their financial life. One of the advantages of getting my first Securities & Futures Commission (SFC) license, pre-Lehman [Brothers, whose collapse in September 2008 triggered the Global Financial Crisis], is that I have a retail license. That is unusual in the industry for independent firms, because most independent [wealth] firms can only work with professional investors (PIs), and have a PI restriction on their licenses.

What that means is that not all my clients are high net worth or ultra-high net worth. We serve a broad range of families. We don’t have an official minimum investment size, and not all clients who work with us invest with us. Sometimes they just need us for financial planning and tax and other aspects of family office services, and other things that we do. 

It’s really about finding the right client, the right relationships, people that we can serve successfully and have a positive impact on their financial lives over a long period of time. I always tell our team we did not become entrepreneurs to work with people we don’t like. We have a strong client base and the ability to select for clients who are a good fit for our services, our team and our approach. As a result, we’ve built a practice working with families and individuals who we really enjoy, where we are the trusted advisor, and therefore we have the opportunity to have an impact on their lives in a lot of different ways.

The business has grown dramatically. We’ve had some mergers and acquisitions along the way. We’ve built offices and we’ve acquired offices. As of today, we’re about 90 people globally, in six offices, in Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong in Asia, and Dallas, New York and New Jersey in the US. Technically we also have a small Florida office. On the investment side, we manage close to US$5 billion in assets. We’ve grown the practice substantially. Our Asian and US businesses are somewhat separate and obviously my space is largely Asia. 

Q. Can you share some of your war stories, in terms of unusual circumstances?

A. If you think about some of the things we do for families, it’s often incredibly personal. Some of the stories I can share and others I can’t. We also have a pro bono practice. Typically, we take on women going through death and divorce who can’t afford [legal] support, so we do that work pro bono.

Obviously, we’re not the attorneys, but we will help them go through probate. We will help them organize their financials. We will help them do financial planning for people who need that support. Because we do that work for our clients, and as painful as some of that is, some of the best opportunities we have to help people are in their time of need.

Death of a family member and divorce are two of the big areas. We do some divorce mediation work, serving as a financially neutral and collaborative practitioner on the tax side, when they are going through those kinds of issues. We get to do some really cool planning. A lot of that I don’t get to talk about, but some of it is also really hard, unfortunately. 

As a financial professional, I think the ability to help families deal with difficult situations, to deal with family conflict, comes from my training as a mediator and frankly, a social worker, which allows me to step into a variety of situations. We train our team in more holistic areas, whether it’s mediation, divorce, estate or other types of planning. 

While we have a very robust investment practice and we’re very good investors and deliver good returns for our clients, I think most of our clients would say the key value-add is the relationship, and the ability to understand their needs. [They want us] not only to map their investment goals, but also to invest in their life goals and help them with their personal affairs. 

Q. How has the independent wealth business changed in the time you’ve been running your company?

A. It’s been really interesting. When I first started, and got my first SFC license in early 2008, the vast majority of the business was still very much done by banks, private banks and big institutions. The concept of an independent wealth manager that was providing advice but was not a big institution was still relatively novel in Asia.

The US has had an independent wealth practice that is very large and robust, and has been for a long time, but in 2008 I still had to explain to people what it meant to be an independent wealth manager. How it works is that we provide advice and investment solutions, but we do not take custody. 

We never hold client money. All of our clients have accounts with a private bank, like Interactive Brokers LLC, Charles Schwab, or Fidelity Investments, and we serve as the independent investment advisor. Since 2008, that business model has become much more accepted in Asia to work with an independent manager who is not attached as the custodian of your assets. 

But frankly, the independent wealth industry hasn’t grown as much as it might have. One of the key differentiators for our business is that we serve as a fiduciary. What that means in practical terms is that all of our fees and everything that we charge is fully disclosed.

Hong Kong is still a very heavy retrocession and commission market. The US, Europe and the United Kingdom have moved away from commission-based sales and product-based compensation. A retrocession is a payment someone makes from a transaction. Let’s say I have a client, and they trade Apple Inc shares from their private bank account, where I’m an advisor. Retrocession is if the private bank takes part of the commission fee and gives it back to me. It’s not a common business model in the US and it’s almost unheard of or illegal in Europe and the UK, but it is very prevalent and represents the majority of the independent wealth industry in Asia. 

It’s a way that an advisor is financially compensated that the client doesn’t see. It is not transparent and is often not fully disclosed or clearly disclosed. It was really important when we set up our business that we wanted to be a fiduciary. We wanted to be on the same side of the table as the client. And in our opinion, you can’t do that if you get paid by products, because an advisor who is paid by product is incentivized to sell the products that pay the most. An advisor who is paid by transaction is incentivized to transact. Neither of those things are in the best interest of the client.

Many, many clients in Asia are well aware [of these limitations] but that is their preferred methodology. That’s how they choose to work with their advisors. We just don’t think that’s the right way to do business, so we’ve never done it. We don’t take commissions. We don’t take these whether you call them retrocessions or trailing commissions. We charge a disclosed fee that we bill our clients. And it doesn’t matter what platform we use or what products we invest in. It doesn’t matter how often we trade. We charge for the service.

And that is unique still in Asia, to have a firm that is a full fiduciary, and we think that is absolutely the right way to serve clients and to align our interests with them. I thought that business model would have grown more in Asia than it has in the time I’ve been doing independent wealth.

But just the concept of an independent wealth manager has grown dramatically, and I think it’s exciting to see the amount of wealth coming into Hong Kong, whether it’s family offices or individuals, the growth in the industry or the ability to have a wide range of service professionals. There are a lot more independent firms here than when I started.

I was one of the founders of the Association of Independent Asset Managers (AIAM) here, and it was myself, the firm that I merged with at the end of 2016 and a couple of other firms. We all together decided we wanted to have an independent industry body for independent wealth. Eventually, when the family office industry here was growing, we decided there was so much overlap between AIAM and the Family Office Association Hong Kong (FOAHK) that we merged AIAM into FOAHK. 

I’m one of the board members for FOAHK, and that industry also has grown. It’s been exciting to see more and more families who are professionalizing, who are thinking about philanthropy, estate planning and legacy. That is also an industry that is still relatively nascent in Hong Kong versus the US and Europe. As wealth has grown here, more and more families are sophisticated in their planning. They demand more in terms of support their families need. It’s not just investment, it’s a lot of other aspects of planning, and that has definitely changed a lot here in the last five years. 

Q. How has the growth in family offices impacted your work in Hong Kong?

A. It’s been exciting to see the government continue to support the industry in Hong Kong. We have had to develop additional skills, to bring on more employees who are able to do family office services. But we’ve also seen more and more international families come into Hong Kong. There are a lot of attractive features about the Hong Kong family office program, just with Hong Kong’s connectivity to China. 

When I’m asked, why would you choose Hong Kong as a family office center? Often it’s for families that have businesses with China connections. It’s families who want access to a robust initial product offering market, who want access to the offshore Renminbi market, and who want access to the clear legal and tax framework that Hong Kong provides. Whether for families who are going to have a regional presence in Asia, or who are looking for a global hub, there are a lot of things about Hong Kong that make it really attractive. And it’s been exciting to see that growth. A lot of international families, cross-border families, Greater China families – all that has helped the industry grow in Hong Kong, and it’s been exciting to be a part of that. 

Q. How do you train and recruit for a new industry?

A. In the US, we could easily hire employees who come from the same background [in fiduciary business] but because so few firms here do that kind of business, we need to hire and train. Being able to hire, train and empower a diverse workforce has been really important in making us successful. 

Hong Kong is not a static market. It continues to grow and evolve. We want to be open to those opportunities and be prepared to change what we do and bring on additional people to benefit from a changing landscape.

Our training is very much hands-on. What some of our employees would probably say they enjoy about their time here is that they get to work directly with senior management and work directly with clients. They very much learn by doing. We bring them in and engage them with the day-to-day activities with clients and the interaction with external stakeholders. It means even our more junior employees start to learn quite quickly the client side of the business, and we work on helping people develop their soft skills. 

Back to that concept of being the best at combining things and providing a holistic experience, a lot of that is a soft skills set. You absolutely can find people with incredible technical skills here and investment backgrounds, but delivering services the way we deliver them, and with that fiduciary mindset, we don’t want an employee coming in and thinking about, what product are they going to sell, or what transactions and trades are they going to do, because that’s how they generate revenue.

We want them focused on what our clients need, and so it’s a very hands-on, team-based, collaborative environment. I think a lot of firms create silos and internal competition, and we’ve deliberately opted not to do that. We have teams that overlap. It’s a very collaborative practice, and we expect everyone to work towards the same goal, regardless of whether or not it’s officially their client. I think that’s quite different from what a lot of the industry does. 

Q. What are Hong Kong’s strengths in terms of family offices?

A. There are several things that make Hong Kong a strong choice for many families who are looking for either a global or a regional footprint for family office. One is the talent. There’s a lot of good people here. It’s a diverse workforce. You can get highly qualified professionals across a very wide range of areas. The talent pool in Hong Kong is quite strong and diverse, which is really important when you’re a family office. For many families, Hong Kong’s is unparalleled in its access to China and Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiatives. 

Hong Kong is a US dollar market, effectively, because of the [US dollar] peg, and it has a very robust IPO market. For many families, that is important for their operating businesses or other aspects of their planning. And Hong Kong is really the leader in Asia in the clarity around the tax framework and the legal framework, which is easy to understand and easy to implement. And I think families we’ve helped come here find it welcoming. They find they get good advice. There are a lot of high-quality service professionals. They are able to execute on their financial goals and still have, from a commercial perspective, the ability to leverage China, the ability to leverage the offshore Renminbi market and leverage the talent pool. 

Government policy has also been helpful. You have dedicated teams that the government supports, whether it’s through InvestHK and its unit, FamilyOfficeHK, or the Hong Kong Academy for Wealth Legacy under the Financial Services Development Council. There are different initiatives. But it’s much less about the conferences and the events. Wealthy families can find plenty of forums to talk to each other. 

Where Hong Kong excels is in helping families tap into the diverse resources they might need to set up a family office. The fact that families coming here can have permanent residency after seven years is an asset. Many other global residency programs are temporary or subject to renewal conditions. Whereas in Hong Kong, if you obtain permanent residency, you really can call Hong Kong home on a long-term basis. The tax code is one of the easiest in the world to understand and follow. 

From an infrastructure perspective, there’s very robust private banking, investment banking and asset management. You can get support easily in a dozen languages. That aspect of the industry is going to help Hong Kong continue to be successful. 

 Q. What do you do when you’re not working?

A. Hong Kong is home. Both my kids were born here. This is where the business is. I don’t know that I ever really thought about leaving and I’ve enjoyed being here. I’ve enjoyed seeing Hong Kong grow. You know, Covid was certainly difficult. It was exciting to see Hong Kong recover from that. One of Hong Kong’s strengths is that there are a lot of smart, innovative people here doing new things, starting new businesses. 

Outside of work, which sometimes doesn’t feel like that many hours, I spend time with my family. My kids are 10 and 12. The education system is also one of Hong Kong’s strengths. There are great not only local but international schools, a wide range of good choices here for families.

Hong Kong is a great travel hub. I used to be more of a triathlete and marathon runner. I’m doing less of that now. We have traveled for races and scuba diving. There’s a lot of great diving, and we do a lot of hiking in the outdoors in the region, especially Japan and Southeast Asia. 

Jessica Cutrera is the President of Leo Wealth, a global wealth management firm created in 2021 by The Capital Company, Leo Group and BFT Financial Group. She was a founder of the Association of Independent Asset Managers (Hong Kong) and a former board member of the Family Office Association Hong Kong. She has a BS in psychology and applied health sciences from Indiana University Bloomington and an MBA in international business from Temple University Japan.