Why are signing officers at Hong Kong investment banks so in demand?

Securities Times reporter Wang Rui

Hong Kong investment banks are severely short on signatories—during the Securities Times reporter’s interviews, from broker-dealer compliance heads to financial headhunters, from recruiting talent to exam training, every step has been sending out similar signals.

In fact, against the backdrop of sustained heating up in Hong Kong-listed stock IPO markets, this trend has been going on for more than a year.

In the first quarter of this year, 40 companies were listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and the amount of IPO funds raised was close to HK$110 billion, up 489% year over year. As of April 6, 384 companies (excluding confidential filings) are still in the queue, waiting to be scheduled for listing hearings. More than three months have just passed since 2026; the number of newly submitted filing companies has already accumulated to 251.

As companies flock to Hong Kong for listings, sponsors have begun to face a shortage, especially among Mainland Chinese investment banks with rich client resources. At first, sponsors were delighted: on one hand, they recruited talent locally in Hong Kong; on the other hand, in accordance with the two-regions’ mutual recognition rules for securities practitioners’ qualifications, they pulled employees from Mainland teams to participate in carrying out Hong Kong projects. However, the hiring process was somewhat difficult—because there was insufficient local talent in Hong Kong, people with experience in underwriting Hong Kong IPOs showed a clearly seller-favoring labor market. In the industry, poaching from one another not only increased personnel mobility, but also triggered a wave of pay raises from externally hired staff to internal employees. In desperation, each compliance head was working under excessive workload—for example, an insider case that a single compliance head could sign off on up to 19 projects was widely circulated in the industry, and some “rushed-to-produce” project documents also drew the attention of regulators.

At the beginning of this year, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange jointly announced that, to ensure application project quality, a compliance head could sign off on at most five projects. On the one hand, this is conducive to forcing investment banks to change the current situation of “taking on too much that can’t be digested.” On the other hand, because the number of signatories in the market is limited, restricting the ratio of signatories to projects is also equivalent to limiting the number of newly submitted filing projects, which helps ease the pressure caused by a backlog in Hong Kong IPOs. It is evident that signatories at Hong Kong investment banks are becoming even more scarce.

If that’s the case, can investment banks train people on their own? The answer is yes, but the process will be very slow. By the time they obtain signing qualifications, the market may have already cooled down. According to information, to become a sponsor with projects eligible for sign-off in Hong Kong, you must first pass the relevant exams; second, you need at least five years of experience in Hong Kong institutional financing and full experience with sponsor projects in order to apply for a license from the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission. The process from application to approval is also slow, requiring more than half a year.

In other words, this batch of sponsors who only started working on Hong Kong projects in 2024–2025 will have to wait until at least 2030 to obtain qualifications to sign off on projects. A headhunter predicts that, due to the shortage of local talent in Hong Kong, Mainland talent with Hong Kong experience will flow to Hong Kong clearly, and investment bank talent that left Hong Kong in the past two years will also show a noticeable return.

Overall, the “talent crunch” among the investment banks that has been sparked by this round of Hong Kong IPO heat is a short-term mismatch between sharply rising market demand and insufficient prior reserves. The core reason is that during the sluggish market period of 2022–2023, few investment banks absorbed the industry’s talent that flowed out with foresight, and even fewer paid attention to building a talent pipeline. As a result, when market opportunities returned, it was hard to seize them.

It can be foreseen that as the “era of big voyages” for Mainland Chinese investment banks gradually gets underway, there may be many more sudden market opportunities like this in the future. For talent-intensive financial institutions, they should accordingly keep a long-term perspective, capture future opportunities through a forward-looking lens, and accumulate talent during tranquil, uneventful times—so they can be sure of victory when it matters most.