HSBC creates a global head of family offices and fills it from Citi

On 9 September 2026, HSBC Private Bank said that Hannes Hofmann would become its global head of family offices, a post the bank had not previously had. He started the following day and is based in London. Bloomberg reported the hire on the day it was announced.

Hofmann joins from Citi Private Bank, where he was global head of the family office group. Before that he spent 20 years at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, working in New York, Hong Kong and London. HSBC says he will own its family office proposition across the bank and work alongside the corporate and institutional banking teams, which is the part of the mandate that matters: the pitch to a family office is access to the whole balance sheet, not a portfolio service.

A second appointment was announced at the same time. Cayman Wills becomes head of the US Private Bank on 22 September. She also comes from Citi Private Bank, where she ran the north-east region, and spent 18 years at J.P. Morgan before that.

The third hire from the same bank this year

HSBC Private Bank has been led since 5 January 2026 by Ida Liu, whose previous job was global head of Citi Private Bank. Her appointment was announced on 22 December 2025 and she reports to Barry O’Byrne, who runs HSBC’s international wealth and premier banking arm. Eight months later she has hired the man who ran Citi’s family office franchise and a regional head from the same business.

The pattern is worth stating plainly because the three moves are not separate events. A chief executive recruited from a competitor has rebuilt the top of her new employer’s ultra-wealthy coverage using people she worked with at the old one. HSBC held assets of $3,234 billion at the end of September 2025, so the bank was never short of scale. What it lacked, on its own description of the Hofmann role as newly created, was a single person accountable for family offices worldwide.

What it means for family offices

Coverage of family offices at the large banks is personal before it is institutional. A family office that chose a bank partly because of the people running its family office group should assume those relationships are now in play, and should expect to be approached. The reverse also applies: the proposition that was sold does not travel with the individual, and a new global head arrives with a mandate to change it.

The detail that a global head of family offices did not exist at HSBC until this month is the more useful one for any family assessing a bank. Several institutions market a family office offering that turns out to be a coordination layer over existing product desks rather than a business with its own leadership, budget and profit-and-loss. Asking who owns the segment globally, how long they have held the role, and what they can commit that a private banker cannot, separates the two quickly. On the evidence of the past nine months, the answer at several banks will change again.

Sources: Bloomberg; Portfolio Adviser; Institutional Real Estate, Inc.; HSBC Private Bank.