Born in Shanghai, Eddie Wang spent his childhood in Taiwan and, at the age of 12, came to Hong Kong where he finished his middle school and university studies. His Shanghainese father, a tailor, always impressed on him the need to excel, and in those days, excellence meant only one thing: working for The Bank - the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
Wang joined HSBC in 1973, after six months of working with another local bank.
In 1980, he was asked by John Strickland - who would later become HSBC chairman in Asia - to move to London to look after the production of the bank's own cheque books at a printing factory in Chichester, armed with HK$30 million and given a deadline of six months.
Wang was so successful in this task that his next posting was in Milan where he looked after the printing of the bank's demand drafts. Subsequently, he was moved back to Hong Kong to become the office-planning manager when the bank was building its iconic Central headquarters, designed by Norman Foster.
In 1994, Wang became HSBC's head of China business. 'Some people even thought that we wanted to get back the bank's headquarters in Shanghai,' he says.
After six years of negotiations with the People's Bank of China, which was then in charge of regulating foreign banks on the mainland, Wang was given the option of setting up a 'representative office' in Shanghai - another pioneering status for HSBC.
But after almost 30 years with HSBC, Wang felt the urge to move on. The bank, however, had other plans, asking him to stay for three more years, this time stationed in Los Angeles to help run the private banking business of the newly acquired Republic Bank.