FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
nationthailand

Asia Plus brokerage recruiting younger team

Asia Plus brokerage recruiting younger team

ASIA PLUS Group Holdings Securities (ASP) will establish a young team in preparation for a change in clients’ investment tastes in the near future.

“We’re trying to build a new team of ‘Generation Y’ employees in a bid to serve our clients who are in the same age group [as the new employees] or [younger than] current clients,” said ASP chief executive officer Kongkiat Opaswongkarn.
As the company’s current clients are getting older, he said, it needed to capture younger generations, people who like technology, fashion, dining out, information technology and gadgets. 
They also like to trade stocks and read research papers by themselves.
Generation Y is defined roughly as those who were born between the 1980s and 2000s.
“We are now recruiting new staff for the Gen Y team,” Kongkiat said. 
The brokerage house is now engaged in developing resources and a new organisational culture, spending more than Bt10 million over the past four to five years for that purpose. Some of that was spent on hiring headhunters to find top talents to ensure it has strong successors in the middle-management level. The company has already recruited over 10 people via headhunting from various business fields.
“We have new employees coming in with new thinking and blended with old ones. So we created the new organisational culture,” Kongkiat said.
Early last year, the company changed its name to Asia Plus Group Holdings Securities from Asia Plus Securities as well as adopting a new logo with a modern look. 
He said ASP had renovated its head office building on Sathorn Road in Bangkok to make it more liveable and look like home in an attempt to make its employees comfortable and more productive. The company’s employee turnover rate is only 8 per cent of the total headcount of 850, and most of those leaving have been in low-ranking positions. 
Kongkiat said the firm had succeeded in every category of the securities business, proving that it was on the right track as a result of putting the right business plans in place. 
He added that ASP was considered at the forefront of such services as brokering, investment banking for issuance of initial public offering shares and debt papers, research, and private fund management. 
Apart from building the Gen Y team, Kongkiat said the company would push for more cross-selling of its products and services in a bid to serve clients’ needs. In addition, the company would concentrate more on expanding its wealth-management fund business.
ASP has helped its clients raise funds via bills of exchange, issuing 700 B/Es worth Bt130 billion and ranked in eighth place by value after banks.
“Now we are focusing more on human-resource development while strengthening our competence,” he said. 
The firm has been playing down its brokering business, as the fees are very thin. ASP’s brokerage-fee income is down to 50 per cent of total revenue, compared with 100 per cent 10 years ago.
“The organisation will be able to move forward if it thinks out of the box and injects new things,” he said, adding: “After all, it will begin with the head [of the organisations]. If we don’t push for it, there will not be changed.”
ASP posted a 32-per-cent drop in net profit for 2015 to Bt560 million, due mainly to a decline of brokerage-fee income in line with the stock-market decline.
Brokering income was down by 36 per cent year on year, while advisory-fee income rose by 43 per cent.
 
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