ING Group said it has agreed to sell its Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand insurance businesses to Richard Li Tzar-kai’s Pacific Century Group (PCG) for HK$16.59 billion.

For many wealthy mainland Chinese who immigrated to the US, an American passport is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. More of them are thinking about renouncing their US citizenship, something that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago, when getting a US passport was the ultimate status symbol in China.

Global banks that hoped to make Hong Kong a platform to win rich mainland clients are now under growing pressure after disappointing market performance to begin sacking staff to save costs.