Marco Sun sits at his desk in Shanghai every morning, and gets on the phone to 400 of his Citibank colleagues across China to bring them up to speed on overnight market movements in the US and Europe. “We have a 20-minute morning call between the China research team and all personal bankers,” says Mr Sun. This means that clients who walk into any one of Citi’s 28 smart banking branches, in 13 of the country’s first-tier and second-tier cities, can speak to an investment advisor who has their finger on the pulse.
China is in the midst of a huge wave of urbanisation, which has seen Beijing and Shanghai more than double in size over the past decade, towns mushroom into cities and villages into towns. By 2025, Mckinsey estimates that 350 million people – more than the entire population of the US – will move from China's countryside to its cities.
