Managing wealth starts with earning clients' trust

Taipan in Chinese means big boss, but in the Philippines, it is used to describe powerful, wealthy individuals, and most of them are Chinese-Filipino who head large business empires.

- By ANETH NG-LIM

Taipan in Chinese means big boss, but in the Philippines, it is used to describe powerful, wealthy individuals, and most of them are Chinese-Filipino who head large business empires. No wonder that many young Chinese-Filipino aspire to follow in their footsteps, more interested in setting up businesses that could be the next big thing.

That road would have been the easy one for Melvin Jao Esteban, but he wanted a different path, one that led him to the largest financial institutions in the country and across the region.

"From a young age, I was absolutely captivated by numbers and a love for logic. It truly fascinated me," recalls Esteban. That passion drew him to pursue Mathematics at the University of the Philippines and build a career with banks and insurance companies.

Far from being your usual nine-to-five banker, Esteban is a wealth management specialist. As CEO of WELEAD Financial Advisory Services, his clients not only include the HNWs (high-net-worth) but the ultra HNWs, with investible assets from P40 million to P2.7 billion. It is a testament to his risk management skills that after two decades of working with financial giants, he set up his own advisory company when the world was facing an unprecedented pandemic.

You launched WELEAD Financial Advisory Services in 2019, right in the middle of the COVID crisis. Looking back, would you change anything?

It turned out to be an incredibly opportune moment! That challenging period truly highlighted the critical importance of managing risk over chasing high returns. People suddenly realized that true financial security wasn't just about how much you could gain, but how well you could protect what you had.