BANKING AWARD WINNER ; Skilled adviser sees herself in the role of educator when she meets bank clients to talk about investment strategies
IN 2000, THE Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) gave Anne Chu Chun-tin, now a financial planning manager with HSBC, a taste of what financial planning could be like.
As winner of the Best of the Industry trophy in the Banking Sector, Ms Chu is grateful for her retirement scheme experience and the doors that it has opened to further her career in the financial advisory profession.
She graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong with a degree in economics in 1999, and went straight into the financial services industry. Like many of her graduate peers, she was drafted to work in a sales-related capacity on behalf of the MPF.
Her employer was MPF trustee Zurich Insurance Group and, through a joint venture the company had at the time with a bank, she introduced the MPF scheme to the bank's commercial clients and took responsibility for further employee enrolments and processes related to initial contributions.
'I quite enjoyed it, particularly dealing with clients,' Ms Chu said. 'But after the launch of the MPF in 2000, I was positioned with a subsidiary of the company. My job duties changed and I no longer needed to see my clients, but simply provided them with back-up and after-sales service. I decided to make a change.'
She moved to Hang Seng Bank and worked in the provident fund department where she had to deal with more sizeable clients, large companies with several hundred employees.