Vow Financial is so serious about the booming Chinese market that the company's boss has started learning the language.
Chief executive Tim Brown said he and national sales manager Leighton King have been taking Mandarin classes since late January.
“We started recruiting a lot of Chinese brokers and we were attending Chinese functions so we felt, out of respect, we should learn their language as they’ve learned ours,” he told The Adviser.
“The Chinese market is growing – it’s 15 per cent of the market today. It could get to 20 per cent or 30 per cent over the next two or three years and it’s such an important piece of our growth strategy that we felt it was important to start learning the language.”
Mr Brown said the aggregator was partnered with about 85 Chinese brokers, some of whom were native Chinese and some of whom were raised in Australia, he added.
The brokers were doing business with Chinese who had emigrated to Australia, or who were looking to emigrate, or who had sent their children to Australia to study.
Vow doesn’t have a presence in China, although Mr Brown said there have been preliminary discussions about establishing an aggregation arm there.
Mr Brown said there were still no reliable statistics on the potential of the Chinese market and how lucrative it could be for Vow.
“We haven’t put a number on it. All we know is it’s a growing piece,” he told The Adviser.