Citibank (China) recently became the first foreign brand to offer such private-banking services, targeting those with a net worth of at least $10 million.

Bank of China's threshold for similar services is lower, at $1 million. And because no Chinese bank has ever been in the business of managing private wealth, the bank formed a partnership with Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC to get financial-planning expertise and management advice.

John Shelley, a private banker with a division in RBS called Coutts Bank Von Ernst, says Bank of China now has about 100 to 200 private-banking clients, who on average have $655,000, lower than the stated threshold. "But we know many of them are significantly more wealthy than that," he says.

The push to openly court China's wealthy has accelerated since Beijing approved a law protecting private property.

A Merrill Lynch-Capgemini report from 2006 estimates the mainland has 320,000 superrich-people with at least $1 million in net assets-who collectively possess $1.59 trillion of assets. Their average net worth is nearly $5 million. Merrill puts the number of people with a net worth of more than $30 million at about 4,540.

Private bankers get very little elbow room to do their job, says Yi Wang, a partner at McKinsey & Co. in Shanghai. Banks aren't allowed to invest customers' money in domestic stocks and only recently were permitted to invest small sums in foreign equities. Mostly, investors can put their money in short- and medium-term corporate and government bonds, asset-backed securities and mortgage-backed securities.

Despite the limitations, analysts say many banks are leveraging their wealth-management services to build up a following, so that when China allows them to offer a more complete range of services for private banking, they will have the client base to support their operations.

Guan Jian, general manager of Bank of China's private-banking department in Shanghai, concedes that training a local talent pool from scratch will require many years of patient work. "We'll need to expose them to international practices and equip them with a global perspective on how private banking is done," she says.

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