Premium clients in Asia are telling brokers something the industry has been slow to hear: deposit size alone does not define a high-value trader, and loyalty is built in WhatsApp groups and on golf courses as much as on trading platforms. That was the central message from a panel at the Finance Magnates Singapore Summit 2026, which ran across three days from 12 to 14 May 2026.
Senior executives from CMC Markets, IG Group, eToro, Orient Futures, USAM Group/PitchFintech and Returning.AI took part in a session titled ‘Join The Club: What Premium Clients Want.’ Their collective argument: affluent and high-activity traders in Asia expect frictionless onboarding and resilient technology as a baseline, but they make their final brokerage choices based on human relationships, referrals and lived experience.
What Premium Clients in Asia Actually Want
Moderator Desmond Leong, Founder and CEO of Returning.AI (a gamified trader engagement and loyalty platform designed to boost retention for CFD brokers), opened the discussion with a pointed challenge to the industry’s default metrics. ‘It’s not just the deposit size, it’s not just the account balance,’ he told the audience. ‘What else that we are not seeing but the data is showing will give us ideas of how high-value a client would be.’
The answer the panel converged on was behavioural scoring: using trade frequency, referral activity and login patterns to identify valuable traders before large deposits ever arrive. According to reporting from the summit by Indoneo, panellists argued that a $100,000 account trading 20 times a week should rank above a $500,000 dormant account in any sensible client-value framework. The active trader generates more revenue, more data and more referral potential; the large but idle balance does none of those things.
Behavioural scoring is not simply an analytical exercise. It changes where brokers direct their relationship managers, their event invitations and their product development budgets. If your scoring model still weights static account balance above activity, you are probably lavishing attention on the wrong clients.
Relationships and ‘Money-Can’t-Buy’ Access Drive Retention
The panel was equally direct about what keeps premium clients once they are identified. Speed matters, trust matters, and so do experiences that cannot be replicated by a competitor offering a marginally lower spread. Private WhatsApp groups that deliver market colour before it reaches a public channel, golf invitations that put a trader in the room with a senior executive, exclusive webinars with proprietary analysts: these are the loyalty mechanisms that panellists described as genuinely differentiating in Asia’s high-net-worth segment.
That has implications for cost. Delivering ‘money-can’t-buy’ experiences at scale is structurally expensive. Smaller brokers entering the Asian premium market face a genuine tension between personalisation and scalability, which is part of why engagement technology platforms have attracted attention from regional brokers looking to systematise what was previously left to individual relationship managers.
Orient Futures Singapore, one of the panellists’ firms, holds a Capital Markets Licence issued by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and offers exchange-traded derivatives, OTC derivatives (contracts traded directly between parties rather than on a central exchange) and leveraged foreign exchange, among other products. Its participation in the panel reflected the breadth of the regional broker community wrestling with these questions, from pure-play CFD houses to multi-asset derivatives firms.
The summit’s three-day format included forums, masterclasses, speed networking sessions and roundtable discussions, reflecting an industry event that has moved well beyond keynote speeches toward working sessions where practitioners compare notes on live problems.
A separate session on the Craft Stage, covered by Finance Magnates, took up the technology side of the same question: what separates brokers now is connectivity and user experience. Edmund Lee, Growth Manager for Singapore at TradingView, and Kenny Wan, Head of Sales at Penguin, made the case that platform infrastructure is no longer a differentiator in isolation; it only becomes one when it reinforces the relationship layer that premium clients in Asia still demand from the humans behind the screen.
The practical upshot for brokers competing in this segment: audit your client-scoring model before your next retention campaign. A dormant seven-figure account may look impressive on a balance sheet; the active five-figure trader three seats away from them may be the one worth fighting to keep.
