Best quotes from Hong Kong's Global Financial Leaders' Summit
The highly anticipated Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit that ended in Hong Kong this week was a big investor highlight.
The event brought together a star-studded galaxy of chief executives from some of the world's biggest banking groups and investment managers.
Across multiple panel sessions, they shared their thoughts on investment strategies, asset allocation and the evolving global financial landscape.
Many of the discussions were thought-provoking and deeply insightful -- and threw up a good crop of memorable quotes on various aspects of investing and finance.
AsianInvestor curated the best comments from the two-day event.
Read on to see who said what.
ON THE ROLE OF PRIVATE CREDIT IN ENERGY TRANSITION/DECARBONISATION
“Most of the capital that I see being required for decarbonisation, energy transition to use your term, is not actually equity. It's debt and hybrid.
"I think it is going to be the largest use of capital since the invention of fire. And we see it everywhere across almost every company, and it is mostly, in our opinion, brown to green.
And it is a financing activity. And that financing activity is throughout the banking system. It's a very significant portion of demand and for us, just like any other financing.”
Marc Rowan
CEO, Apollo Global Management
“In the role we play in ESG and climate financing, we deal with many of the basic companies who need financing to improve their emissions.
"It's challenging because the quantum of financing is huge. It's an area where standards are being developed, but they're still not solidified.
"We all still don't know the true price of risk. And it's being intermediated by governments. So it's a great opportunity, but there's a challenge in making sure that we understand the risks and the benefits."
CS Venkatakrishnan
Group Chief Executive, Barclays
ON INVESTING IN CHINA
“I think about the big picture—you could have been an investor in the United States at almost any point over the last 100 years, had solely a domestic investment portfolio and have done extraordinarily well.
The world's changed. There is much more innovation outside the United States relative to 50 years ago.
This morning I was with one of the prominent Chinese business leaders, the management teams in China are extraordinarily capable. They produce extremely competitive products in the global stage. They lead in many areas that are important to the world. If you're a global investor, you've got to be watching and investing in China."
Ken Griffin
Founder and CEO, Citadel
ON INCORPORATING DIVERSITY, EQUITY, INCLUSION IN INVESTING
GCM Grosvenor
“I think it’s clear to most business leaders that a diverse team make better decisions.
"You have better ability to relate to your customers, better opportunities to relate to your opportunities, and better ability to see your risks. So you want a diverse team, part of the way you get that is through intentionality, you have to actually be intentional, you have to work towards that and build that.
"That’s been a constant effort for us for a long time. We have very good results to show in an industry that does not have a tremendous amount of diversity in the workforce."
Michael J Sacks
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, GCM Grosvenor
Marshall Wace
“I looked at the Marshall Wace demographic breakdown.
"In fact, 24% of our workforce worldwide are ethnic Chinese. We have a lot in Asia. We have a lot of ethnic Chinese in the US and the UK.
"But there's also something which is very intriguing to me, is that Chinese women are extremely good portfolio managers and analysts. The sample size is not necessarily big enough to do kind of proper academic study.
But we have an incredibly high hit rate of very good and successful Chinese women at Marshall Wace."
Sir Paul Marshall
CIO and Chairman, Marshall Wace
ON THE ROLE OF GENERATIVE AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE)
“We very much view generative AI, when it came on the stage last November, as a once in a lifetime change. If you think of an average person's job, about 80% of the time is processing 20% is content. We expect that to flip through the amplifying power of AI as it comes through."
Jane Fraser
CEO of Citi
Franklin Templeton
“If you've ever paid a trainer to train your dog, you learn that 20% of the effort is training the dog and 80% of the effort is training you as the owner of the dog. And generative AI is a bit like that.
"When you think you're training a model, it's actually learning how to engage with that model, to iterate and get better and better, and that's much more challenging."
Jenny Johnson
President and CEO of Franklin Templeton
"Artificial intelligence has been something we have been working with for some time, it started with this predictive AI, which basically is putting numbers in numbers come out.
"I think, what's really powerful now, as we move to generative AI, that you can not only put in numbers, but pictures and videos and language, and you can start to transform businesses."
Jon Gray
President and COO, Blackstone
ON THE EVOLVING ROLE OF BLOCKCHAIN AND DIGITAL ASSETS
Citi
" We give a real shout out to the HKMA as well around the framework that's been put in place.
"Because I think we've seen as new technologies, particularly in the digital asset space come out, if you don't have the right framework around, it really inhibits both the innovators, it inhibits institutions, it certainly inhibits the users and the consumers.
"I think that's why we're seeing quite a few of the leaps forward here, in areas such as blockchain and tokenisation."
Jane Fraser
CEO, Citi
ON GEOPOLITICAL RISKS AND INVESTING
"You need to have people on the ground in all the major countries around the world that relies on having a really informed network of experts. For most of our business, the geopolitical risk that makes the headline stories does not impact our portfolio.
"But then, what do you see--a war in the Ukraine, which puts all energy supplies into Europe, at risk in jeopardy, and all of a sudden, geopolitical risk becomes front and center of all of your risk-taking decisions."
Ken Griffin
Founder and CEO, Citadel
Schroders
ON MERGING PRIVATE AND PUBLIC MARKETS
"There's a major asset allocation switch going on in the world between public markets and private. I think a private company, which trades on a regular basis, potentially on an exchange, is no different from a public company.
"We make a very big distinction between those two asset classes in our world the same way as 20 years ago, when the equities division lived completely separate from fixed income divisions. And now they're part of the same ecosystems.
"I think we're going to see exactly the same thing happen between public and private, and the advent of DLT technology, and other technologies may facilitate that. But more and more the coming together of that arbitrage, I think it's the thing that we have to watch most among others.”
Peter Harrison
Group Chief Executive, Schroders