From NT$728 billion in the Kaohsiung pilot zone to 23,000 high-asset banking clients island-wide, a channel-by-channel ranking of the figures each one publishes
By: Christian Brooks – AsiaPresswire – A hundred and eighteen thousand people in Taiwan, China held investable assets above NT$100 million in 2025. Together they controlled NT$43.7 trillion. The 2026 forecast is 124,000 people and NT$46.1 trillion. Those are the numbers the wealth industry quotes at conferences, and they are the right numbers to start from, because they set the size of the prize before anyone starts arguing about how to divide it.
Here is the second number. Twenty-one domestic banks, licensed since 2020 to run a dedicated high-asset client business, report roughly 23,000 clients between them. That is 19.5 percent of the population the industry is targeting. The other four-fifths of Taiwan’s millionaire households are not absent from the financial system. They are simply not in the channel that the policy is built around, and the reasons are specific, mechanical, and mostly about what each channel is legally allowed to hold.
So this is a ranking. Not of prestige, and not of growth rates, which flatter new entrants for obvious reasons. The ranking is by a single measure: how much a household with NT$100 million can actually put to work through a given channel, using only the figures that channel or its regulator has published. Six channels, ranked from the bottom.
The zone the whole policy is built on, in four numbers
Start with the container, because everything else sits inside it.
The Asia Asset Management Centre pilot zone opened in Kaohsiung in July 2025. At the end of March 2026, it reported 3,736 high-asset clients and NT$455.9 billion of assets under management. Three months later, at the end of June, it reported 6,214 clients and NT$728.1 billion.
Divide the second pair: client count up 66.3 percent in one quarter, AUM up 59.7 percent. Divide AUM by clients and the average Kaohsiung zone relationship is NT$117.2 million. That is not a retail number and it is not a private bank number in the Singaporean sense. It is the size of a relationship that a domestic bank can build with a business owner who has sold a factory, kept the property, and wants the rest to earn something without leaving the country.
| Metric | 31 March 2026 | 30 June 2026 | Change |
| High-asset clients in zone | 3,736 | 6,214 | +66.3% |
| Assets under management | NT$455.9 bn | NT$728.1 bn | +59.7% |
| Average relationship | NT$122.0 m | NT$117.2 m | -3.9% |
| Financial institutions | 21 banks | 58 institutions | +37 |
Read the third row. The average relationship fell 3.9 percent while the book grew 59.7 percent. That is what a channel looks like when it moves down-market: the marginal client arriving in the second quarter is smaller than the client who arrived in the first. This is not a criticism. It is the predictable arithmetic of a pilot that starts with the largest families and works downward, and it tells you the addressable base inside the zone is wider than the first cohort suggested.
Now put NT$728.1 billion in context. Taiwan’s total assets under management stood at NT$40.63 trillion at the end of March 2026, up from NT$32.56 trillion two years earlier — an increase of NT$8.07 trillion against a two-year target of NT$4 trillion. The Kaohsiung zone is 1.8 percent of that total. The high-asset population’s own NT$43.7 trillion is the better denominator: the zone holds 1.7 percent of it.
A pilot zone holding 1.7 percent of its target market after a year is not a failure. It is also not the transformation the launch language promised. What it is, precisely, is a licensing experiment that has proved domestic banks can hold complex products without the republic collapsing — which was the actual question the regulator needed answered.
Rank 6: cross-border, where the count is two
Two offshore branch accounts. That is the entire disclosed cross-border result of the Kaohsiung zone’s first year, from the Financial Supervisory Commission’s own anniversary release.
Two. Not two thousand. Two.
The number is small for a reason that has nothing to do with demand. Opening an offshore banking unit account for a non-resident high-asset client requires documentary evidence of source of funds that a Taiwanese bank cannot easily obtain for a client whose assets sit in Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City, plus an AML review that no branch manager wants to be the test case for. The compliance cost per account is enormous relative to the fee. So the accounts that were opened were almost certainly relationship-driven exceptions, not a process.
Rank this channel last on volume and first on strategic importance, and be clear about which is which. If Taiwan wants to compete with Hong Kong, China and Singapore for the family offices of overseas Chinese business owners, the cross-border plumbing is the whole product. A family office that cannot move money across a border is a domestic wealth advisory practice with a more expensive name.
Rank 5: offshore funds, NT$244 million per product
Sixteen offshore funds that do not qualify as securities investment trust funds, distributed through a multi-channel pilot, with NT$3.9 billion held by investors at the end of June 2026.
Divide: NT$244 million per product. For a fund distribution channel, that is a rounding error. A single successful domestic equity fund at a mid-sized securities investment trust company holds more.
The constraint here is product approval, not investor appetite. The pilot exists because these funds sit in a regulatory gap — offshore vehicles that are not authorised domestic funds and not straightforwardly permitted retail products. Sixteen approved products in a year, against the thousands available to a Singapore-based private bank, is a supply problem. And a supply problem in fund distribution is not solved by marketing. It is solved by reciprocity agreements and by the regulator accepting a foreign prospectus as sufficient disclosure, which is precisely the negotiation that the special law now under drafting is meant to conclude.
Rank 4: insurance, NT$18.9 million per policy
Three hundred and seventy policies, NT$7.0 billion of premium, average NT$18.9 million.
This channel is underrated and it is the one where the numbers have the most internal texture. Fubon Life alone reported 282 policies and NT$5.37 billion of premium through the zone by the end of June — NT$19.0 million per policy, essentially identical to the zone average, which tells you the pilot’s insurance business is a single product type sold to a single client type.
The product type is the interesting part. These are policies approved under a pilot rule that waives the minimum ratio of death benefit to policy value reserve. In plain terms: they are savings and estate-planning vehicles with a thin insurance wrapper, allowed in the zone because the standard rule would have made them uneconomic. Two of Fubon’s four pilot products are participating policies and two are foreign-currency interest-variable policies.
Then connect it to the credit line. Cathay United reported that about 30 percent of its high-asset clients in the zone used premium financing — borrowing against the policy to pay the premium. That is the mechanism that turns an NT$18.9 million policy into a leveraged estate-planning structure, and it explains why the zone’s loan book is so much larger than its wealth management book.
| Channel | Clients or contracts | Assets or premium | Per unit |
| Family office advisory | 189 families | NT$91.5 bn | NT$484.1 m |
| Credit and Lombard lending | 4,313 drawdowns | NT$71.9 bn | NT$16.7 m |
| Insurance pilot products | 370 policies | NT$7.0 bn premium | NT$18.9 m |
| Wealth management | 427 clients | NT$5.0 bn | NT$11.7 m |
| Offshore funds | 16 products | NT$3.9 bn | NT$243.8 m |
| Cross-border OBU accounts | 2 accounts | not disclosed | not disclosed |
Rank 3: wealth management, the smallest number in the zone
Four hundred and twenty-seven clients. NT$5.0 billion of investment balance. NT$11.7 million each.
This is the odd one. The channel named “wealth management” is the smallest line in the zone’s own scorecard, smaller than the insurance pilot by a factor of 1.4 in assets and by a factor of 5.8 in client count. The reason is definitional and worth understanding, because it explains how the whole pilot is wired.
In the zone’s taxonomy, “wealth management” means discretionary portfolio mandates and advisory relationships booked as investment balances. It does not include deposits, structured notes held to maturity, or the investment portion of an insurance policy. A client with NT$117 million in the zone might show up in the credit book, the insurance book, and the family office count while contributing nothing to the NT$5.0 billion wealth management line. The scorecard is additive across channels, not partitioned, and reading it as a partition produces nonsense.
What the NT$11.7 million figure does tell you is that discretionary asset management remains structurally weak in Taiwan. Clients here buy products; they do not hand over a mandate. That behaviour is a legacy of a market where the advisory relationship was historically free, embedded in brokerage, and where a fee-based discretionary mandate is a product category that arrived about fifteen years later than it did in Hong Kong, China or Singapore.
Rank 2: family office advisory, NT$484 million per family
One hundred and eighty-nine families. NT$91.5 billion under advice. NT$484.1 million per family.
That is the highest per-unit number in the entire zone by a wide margin, 4.1 times the average client relationship. It is also the line item that grew fastest: 139 families and NT$80.2 billion at the end of March, 189 families and NT$91.5 billion three months later. Client count up 36 percent, assets up 14 percent — again the down-market drift, and again a sign of a channel widening rather than deepening.
Here the arithmetic has to be handled carefully, because Taiwan does not have a family office statute. There is no equivalent of Singapore’s Section 13O or 13U tax incentive schemes, no single licence that says “this entity is a family office”, and no minimum asset test written into law. What exists is an advisory service offered by banks and securities firms inside the pilot, plus a set of civil-law structures — the closely held company, the limited partnership, the trust — that a wealthy family can use to hold assets together.
So the NT$91.5 billion is a measure of advice, not of assets domiciled in a family office vehicle. The distinction matters enormously for anyone comparing Taiwan to Singapore. Singapore’s more than 2,000 single-family offices under tax incentive are legal entities with substance requirements, employment conditions and annual filings. Taiwan’s 189 are advisory mandates. Comparing the two counts is comparing a corporate registry to a client list.
The gap is precisely what the special law is meant to close. The Financial Supervisory Commission has said it is drafting a dedicated statute covering market development, asset management structures, international talent, tax incentives and zone design. Until that statute passes, the family office channel in Taiwan, China has advice without architecture.
Rank 1: credit, NT$71.9 billion and the real engine of the zone
Four thousand three hundred and thirteen drawdowns. NT$71.9 billion of loan balance. NT$16.7 million per drawdown.
Rank this first, because it is the largest productive number in the zone after AUM itself and because it is the channel that makes every other channel work. Strip out credit and the pilot’s economics collapse: NT$5.0 billion of wealth management plus NT$3.9 billion of offshore funds plus NT$7.0 billion of insurance premium is NT$15.9 billion of client activity against a loan book nearly five times larger.
Three products sit inside that number. Lombard lending, which is a securities-backed line. Self-pledged lending, which is borrowing against assets already held at the same institution. Premium financing, which is borrowing to fund an insurance policy. All three convert an existing asset into liquidity without a sale, and a sale is the thing a Taiwanese business owner with a low-cost-basis holding most wants to avoid.
Run the tax logic and it becomes obvious. Taiwan reintroduced a minimum 20 percent alternative minimum tax on capital gains for high-income individuals and, since 2023, has applied controlled foreign corporation rules that pull offshore retained earnings into the domestic tax base. A shareholder who has held a company since the 1990s has a basis so low that selling is close to a 20 percent haircut on the whole gain. Borrowing against the shares at a spread over the one-year lending rate costs a fraction of that. Every NT$16.7 million drawdown in the Kaohsiung zone is, in most cases, a tax decision wearing a financing costume.
What the other 95,000 households are holding
Return to the gap. 118,000 high-asset individuals, 23,000 in bank high-asset programmes, 6,214 in the Kaohsiung zone.
The missing 95,000 are not hiding. They are concentrated in three places, and each one tells you something about what the pilot has not yet solved.
The first is offshore. The cohort above NT$3 billion holds NT$12.1 trillion, and 48 percent of it sits outside Taiwan — NT$5.81 trillion, most of it in Singapore and Hong Kong, China. That is a revealed preference. These families have already made the jurisdictional choice, and a domestic pilot zone does not reverse it; only a tax treaty network and a credible family office statute would.
The second is insurance, held outside the pilot. Taiwan’s insurance penetration is among the highest in the world, and a very large share of household wealth sits in policies written years ago at guaranteed rates no current product can match. Those policies are not going to be surrendered to move into a zone product that pays less.
The third is property, which is not a financial asset for regulatory purposes and is therefore invisible in every AUM statistic quoted above. For a Taipei household with a NT$100 million apartment and NT$30 million of securities, the financial wealth industry is competing for 23 percent of the balance sheet.
The constraint nobody put in the scorecard: people
Run the hiring numbers and a quieter problem surfaces.
The FSC reported that banks and securities and futures firms had added 545 and 118 staff respectively for the asset management programme. Banks expect to reach 1,066 additional hires by the end of 2026, of which 252 are designated for the Kaohsiung zone.
Divide 252 by 58 institutions. That is 4.3 people per institution for a business that is supposed to serve 6,214 clients holding NT$728.1 billion, and to convert some fraction of the 95,000 high-asset households that are not yet in the system.
A relationship manager for a NT$100 million client is not a salesperson with a product list. The job requires reading a balance sheet that includes an operating company, a property portfolio, an insurance book and an offshore structure, then producing a recommendation that survives a tax review and a family argument. Taiwan has a deep pool of bankers who can sell. It has a much thinner pool of people who can do the other thing, and the FSC’s own hiring projection effectively concedes the point: 252 new bodies against a national target of 124,000 high-asset individuals by the end of the year.
This is the rate-limiting step that no amount of licensing reform accelerates. Singapore spent two decades importing that expertise. Hong Kong, China built it inside a private banking industry that has been running since the 1970s. Taiwan is trying to build it in four years with a domestic talent pool and a hiring plan measured in hundreds.
What a family actually pays for jurisdiction
The comparison every Taiwanese family with NT$3 billion eventually runs is not about service quality. It is about the cost of maintaining a structure.
A Singapore single-family office under the tax incentive schemes faces a minimum fund size of S$20 million under Section 13O and S$50 million under Section 13U, an obligation to employ investment professionals — one at the entry tier, three at the upper tier after the 2025 tightening — and a requirement to deploy a share of the fund into qualifying local investments. The published descriptions of those thresholds do not agree with each other across sources, which is itself a warning: the rules have been amended repeatedly, and anyone quoting a single version is quoting a moment.
Set the ambiguity aside and the structure is still legible. A Singapore SFO with S$50 million is a company with staff, audited accounts, a local director and an annual filing. Its running cost is a real number, in the low hundreds of thousands of Singapore dollars a year before investment fees.
Taiwan’s alternative is an advisory mandate inside the pilot plus, if the family wants a holding vehicle, a closely held company. That structure is cheaper to run by an order of magnitude. It is also less useful for anything that crosses a border, and it offers no equivalent of the tax certainty that a Singapore incentive letter provides.
So the honest framing is not “Taiwan versus Singapore”. It is “advice versus architecture”. Taiwan, China now sells advice at a competitive price. Singapore sells architecture at a premium. A family that needs the architecture will pay the premium regardless of where it feels most comfortable, which is why 48 percent of the top cohort’s assets are already offshore and why a domestic pilot will not pull them back.
The channel to rank last is the one everyone asks about first
Every foreign private bank pitching Taiwan opens with the same comparison: NT$43.7 trillion of high-asset wealth, only a fifth of it in professional hands, an enormous runway. The comparison is accurate and the conclusion drawn from it is usually wrong, because it assumes the runway is under-construction when the actual constraint is architectural.
Three numbers make the point better than any argument. NT$728.1 billion in the zone after twelve months. Five trillion eight hundred billion outside the country in the top cohort alone. Two cross-border accounts.
The first number says the pilot works as an experiment. The second says the market has already voted on where it wants its assets to live. The third says the plumbing to change that vote has not been installed. A ranking that puts cross-border last is not dismissing it; it is observing that until the count moves from two to something with a comma in it, every other channel in the zone is serving families who have already decided to keep their international wealth somewhere else.
Sources
- Financial Supervisory Commission, press release on the Kaohsiung pilot zone first anniversary, 24 July 2026 (fsc.gov.tw)
- Central News Agency, “Kaohsiung asset management zone marks first anniversary,” 24 July 2026
- Central News Agency, “Asset management pilot business to expand island-wide,” 11 May 2026
- United Daily News, coverage of the 2026 county and city policy briefing, Kaohsiung session, May 2026
- China Times, “Premier declares Kaohsiung model to be extended nationwide,” 25 July 2026
- Track B wealth management dataset, Taiwan high-asset population and offshore allocation series, knowledge base compiled October 2026