Shih, who has led this business since 2002, has always emphasised growth. This was not an obvious move at the time. When she took over as head of the bank, the region was just recovering from the global technology bust and, in 2003, the Sars virus outbreak. Most thinking at the time was more about personal relocation strategies, not about business expansion.

"We decided to be bold and double our business. Today in newspapers you see people talking about wanting to double their business in three years. But back in 2003 we were the first to say it," Shih said.

Shih was raised in the Philippines in a well-to-do Chinese family. She and her four siblings left for Singapore when she was 13 after her father sold the family business, a packaging firm, and in 1987 started as a client adviser in Hong Kong with Swiss Bank Corporation, a storied private bank.

She was only one of three client advisers for the firm at the time in Hong Kong. Asian wealth management in those years was a sleepy business, with Hong Kong regarded as a backwater by the European institutions that dominated the business.

But Shih was an early star performer. She used connections with family and friends to quickly ramp up her assets to exceed US$1 billion. She asked for a team to help her manage her clients.

"I said to my boss: 'Give me some people. I'll give them some clients because I can't handle all of them myself.' So, I started on a management path," said Shih.

She became head of Hong Kong operations in 1994. Swiss Bank merged with UBS in 1998, and in 2002 she was given the job of overseeing UBS' Asia-Pacific wealth management franchise, making her one of the most powerful women in Asian banking.

Having overseen decades of economic growth in Asia, Shih has always been predisposed to expand aggressively, and this has always been her management MO. She presided over a tripling of assets, and a quadrupling in headcount.

She was always an aggressive hirer. However, when she began her expansion, the talent pool in Asia was thin. There simply were not enough private bankers in Asia, at rival banks or elsewhere, to support her ambitions. Shih responded by hiring outside the industry, and in 2007 oversaw the opening of the Wealth Management Campus in Singapore, which trains new private bankers. It was the first of its kind in Asia, and UBS had a big part in training a generation of private bankers that have since fanned out to other institutions.

Two of her siblings work in private banking - her sister is vice-chairman for Southeast Asia wealth management in Singapore, and her brother works for a rival institution.

Shih is a private person. She attends work-related social events but otherwise prefers to stick to a tight network of close friends and family. She's an avid golfer, playing on weekends in Fanling and in Vancouver during the summer. She is also a keen tennis player, contacting friends via WhatsApp to arrange last-minute night games.

Shih's career ascent has been extraordinarily steady, and ultimately this comes down to nothing more mysterious than hard graft. A headhunter described her as "tenacious". She does not dispute the label. "Things have not come easily at all," she says. "Everything has been hard work."

Mignonne Cheng is a serious woman with some serious titles. She was awarded Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, a kind of French knighthood, in May 2012. She served as a member of the Banking Advisory Committee chaired by Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah, and was a member of the Consultative Committee of the Basic Law in 1985-89, when this mini-constitution was drafted.

As a member of BNP Paribas' G100, she is one of the top 100 people in the bank. "It's rather prestigious," said Cheng.

She is a newcomer to private banking, but she came to the industry at the top: in 2010, she was named head of BNP Paribas' Asia-Pacific wealth management operations, having previously served as the head of BNP's investment banking operations in north Asia. Most of her 35 years in finance have been spent as an investment banker, where she specialised in client coverage in Hong Kong, Taiwan and on the mainland.

She was brought into wealth management to increase integration between the bank's wealth management and investment banking arms. Many individual clients handled by the investment banking arm are very wealthy, which makes them natural candidates for private banking, too. These individuals would want the services of both arms of the banks, so it make sense for the bank to share information about clients and to cross-sell.

This is a common practice among the large banks, but it's also somewhat controversial. The concern is that the investment banks will roll over the private banks and force them to sell their investment products, whether or not it's in the best interest of the private bank clients.

Cheng is fully aware of this concern but makes no bones about the fact that her role is to fully integrate the two divisions.

"One of the reasons the bank asked me to move from [an investment banking] role ... to become the Asia head for wealth management was to leverage my client franchise, as well as to leverage my working relationship with my [investment banking] colleagues," said Cheng. "Given the culture of cross selling within the bank, the seed has been planted for a couple of years. Obviously, I would like to see the numbers be far more robust."

Cheng is an expert on the products devised by her firm's investment banking side, and one gets the feeling that she is still more investment banker than wealth manager. But she also has excellent relationships with some very rich individual clients in the shipping and property sectors, relationships that began when she covered these clients as an investment banker.

She was also brought into wealth management to localise its operations. BNP breaks Asia into six markets: Hong Kong, the mainland, Taiwan, India, Singapore and international (serving expatriates in Asia). She has reassigned five of six market heads. She did not specify who exactly, but she implies the roles were previously held by French bankers, and she has since assigned local bankers to cover each region.

"I cannot imagine having a French person covering the Chinese market. They hardly speak the language. So there is also quite a bit of change to make sure different types of clients are covered by different types of individuals based on their culture and their background," said Cheng.

She described the transition as a "painful exercise", but seems utterly certain of the wisdom of her strategy.

If Cheng experienced any gender bias during her long career at BNP, she does not speak of it."The fact that I'm not French and not male and I was given the job of head of Greater China demonstrates that a French bank can be a lot more progressive," said Cheng. "Some clients would not believe that a woman would be given the job to be head of a country and region, but BNP Paribas did it, so I have to give them a lot of credit."

Thomas Meier has been head of Asia for the bank since 2005. He has overseen a doubling of assets in his markets, this coming largely on the back of its acquisition of Merrill Lynch's international wealth management business.

The first phase of the integration began last year in May with the Hong Kong and Singapore businesses, which represent one-third of the acquired business. Following the integration, about a quarter of the bank's assets were managed in Asia, making it one of the top five international wealth managers in Asia.

Meier is an avid runner. He haunts the running trails in Tai Tam, The Peak and on Bowen Road. He does the Green Power Hike each year, which is the annual hike of up to 50 kilometres that raises money for the namesake environmental group.

He leads team-building hikes up Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, and up Malaysia's Mount Kinabalu.

He also owns a vineyard in Portugal, and frequently distributes bottles of his wine to clients.

He has a doctorate in law from the University of Zurich for which he "suffered big time".

"I found out that I'm not really a research kind of guy … I had to force myself," he said.

Meier says he is about building trust, an orientation instilled into him during his Swiss upbringing.

"I'm educated and was brought up in a Reformist [religious] environment," said Meier. "You are essentially told that you have to earn your place in heaven, right? You have to work hard. And you have to be humble and modest."

His main achievement at the bank was overseeing the Asian integration of the Merrill Lynch assets. He was a champion of that acquisition within the firm, and it doubled the size of the bank in Asia.

Claude Haberer is an intellectual with a interest in Taoism and its spiritual links to Christianity, and an enthusiastic polo player - he is a private banker, after all.

But he is best known for his flawless Putonghua. So excellent are his skills in this language that he is leading a project to translate all Chinese words (found, among other places, inscribed on ancient animal bones) into multiple languages.

Haberer joined Pictet in 2011 following a 30-year career at BNP Paribas, nearly all of it in Asia. At the time, Pictet had only three bankers in Hong Kong. However, its home market of Switzerland has come under pressure as US and European regulators dismantle the country's bank secrecy laws. Pictet looked around the world for other growth markets and, like so many other wealth houses, decided to make a push in Asia.

The firm recruited Haberer because he was seen as an Asian hand who understood China, and could help the firm localise.

"This time, in order to grow in the Asian market, with Asian customers, Asian bankers, Asian booked accounts and for Asian investments, they [Pictet] wanted someone who was already in the market. So I guess, with my grey hair grown toiling around the region, they thought I would be appropriate," said Harberer.

He began his career in 1980, working as a credit analyst for BNP Paribas in Singapore. Always adept at languages - Haberer also speaks English, French, Spanish, German and Russian - he developed an interest in Putonghua, but quickly realised there were other places to learn and speak that language.

In Paris, Haberer met a woman whose uncle was chairman of the Ricci Institute, a Jesuit institution based in Paris dedicated to China scholarship, in particular the translation of Chinese into multiple languages. Haberer got involved and today he chairs the institute.

The translation project began in the 1940s, when Jesuit priests were thrown out of China following the Communist revolution. They went to Taiwan. With a lot of priests concentrated on an island with a small Roman Catholic population, they had time to begin an epic project - to translate every known Chinese word into French, English, German, Hungarian and Latin.

While the average educated Chinese person knows 6,000 characters, the scholars were translating 300,000 entries. Over the decades, priests dropped out or died, and only the French dictionary continued. It was published in 2002 with Haberer presiding over its launch, and he has the work in his office - all seven volumes, 10,000 pages and 17kg of it. The set can be bought for HK$8,500, or they can download a HK$66 app that has the same information.

"There is no equivalent in any other language," said Harber of the dictionary. "It could only be done by people who were either financed by the church or had time and basically did it out of a sense of mission."

Since landing in Pictet, Haberer helped secure a full Hong Kong banking licence for the firm, and officially opened the Hong Kong branch in September 2012. He has increased his staff sixfold.

Outside observers note he has been able to recruit senior talent to the bank in Hong Kong despite its thin operating history in the market. In a very short time, and after a long period of drift, he has made Pictet credible in China.