About The Asset

The Asset

The Asset is a Hong Kong financial magazine founded in 1999, covering Asian capital markets, treasury, and asset management for the region's corporate and financial decision-makers. It is published by Asset Publishing and Research, and it describes itself as an integrated multimedia company serving a community of leading corporate and financial decision-makers in Asia. The Asset is best known for its Triple A awards — described by the magazine as the industry's most prestigious awards for banking, finance, treasury and the capital markets, and as its annual recognition built on more than two decades of evaluating the region's institutions. An English-language monthly for much of its life, The Asset was born in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, and its first cover story, in its inaugural issue of March 1999, told the story of a Korean company broken up and sold as a consequence of that crisis. Few Asian finance titles can claim so direct a link between their founding moment and their subject matter.

The Asset's readership, on its own account, is made up principally of issuers and investors — the companies, governments and financial institutions that raise money in Asia, and the institutional investors who buy their securities. As it puts it, issuers and investors constitute the bulk of its readership base, and they are consulted in its awards process through its Asset Benchmark Surveys and in the course of Triple A presentations with financial institutions. That two-sided readership, spanning both the sellers and the buyers of Asian securities, is the foundation of the magazine's claim to insight into the region's markets.

Founded in 1999, in the shadow of the Asian financial crisis

The Asset was founded in 1999. Bank of China's summary of the magazine, announcing a trade finance award win, states the fact directly: founded in 1999, The Asset is a well-known financial magazine in Asia, organising awards for financial institutions in Asia annually by means of quantitative scoring and client interview. The inaugural issue appeared in March 1999. A veteran of the magazine, recalling its start in a retrospective titled The Journey Continues, wrote that he had been invited to join The Asset from day one, and that the market backdrop was one of recovery from the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998, followed in later years by the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2008. Through all of it, he wrote, The Asset survived and continued to thrive as an integrated multimedia company.

The first cover story set the tone. It was co-written with the magazine's editor-in-chief, Daniel Yu, and opened on a December afternoon in London in 1998. Its subject was the sale of the crown jewel of the South Korean chaebol Hansol — Hansol Paper — which had fallen prey to the Asian financial crisis. The writer recalled that the Hansol restructuring saga was the first of many stories in The Asset's initial years chronicling how corporates across the region attempted to resuscitate and resurrect themselves from the ashes of the crisis. The magazine's early capital-markets coverage recorded innovations born of that restructuring, such as the Korea Asset Management Corporation's launch in June 1999 of the country's first local-currency asset-backed bonds, amounting to 320 billion won — about US$280 million — secured by non-performing loans.

Daniel Yu and the editorial leadership

Daniel Yu was The Asset's editor-in-chief from its first issue. He co-wrote the inaugural cover story in March 1999, and he was still listed as editor-in-chief in the masthead of the March 2020 issue, more than two decades later — an unusual continuity of editorial leadership for a regional finance title. That March 2020 masthead, in the issue numbered Volume 22, Number 3, also listed Chito Santiago as executive editor, Bayani Cruz as managing editor and Darryl Yu as deputy editor, alongside production, research and events staff and a content solutions and sales operation, reflecting the magazine's combined editorial, awards and commercial structure. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority's 2016 keynote address at The Asset's Asia Treasury and Trade Summit was likewise addressed to Daniel Yu by name, a small sign of the founder-editor's standing with the city's financial authorities.

Long editorial continuity shaped the magazine's method. The same retrospective recalled that its author had begun covering capital markets as a business reporter at one of Hong Kong's English-language dailies in the mid-1980s, when Hong Kong dollar floating rate certificates of deposit and syndicated loans were the usual avenues for fundraising, and had watched the region's markets evolve through The Asset's front seat. The magazine also, in the author's words, stamped its brand in Islamic finance from a time when Islamic finance was still establishing its place in the mainstream capital markets — an early editorial bet on a sector that later became a significant part of Asian issuance, particularly in Malaysia and the Gulf-linked markets.

What The Asset covers: capital markets, treasury and wealth

The Asset covers the business of Asian finance from the issuer's and the treasurer's desk as much as from the investor's. Its website organises coverage under headings that include Treasury and Capital Markets, Wealth, ESG, technology and regional coverage, along with people moves in its On The Move section. Its magazine issues have followed the same architecture: the March 2020 issue, carrying the cover story China Unplugged on supply chains and the unfolding Covid-19 shock, contained sections on the economy, transaction banking, regulation, Belt and Road, and asset management, alongside its awards coverage. That breadth — markets, treasury operations, regulation and wealth in one title — reflects its decision-maker readership, for whom treasury and funding questions sit alongside investment ones.

The historical sweep of its reporting is part of its authority. Marking 25 years of covering Asia's capital markets in 2024, its board of editors wrote that from the dark days of the financial crisis that enveloped Asia in the late 1990s, issuers had taken to heart the hard lessons that brought the region to its knees, and that repair and restructuring of balance sheets had taken time. Alternative sources of funding, from the banking sector to the institutional market, had enabled the best-managed companies to thrive and capture the opportunities of tomorrow. To mark the anniversary, the editors honoured the issuers that had defined 25 years of Asia's financial markets — issuers notable for consistently tapping the capital markets, for opening new channels such as green and social bonds or China's panda and Japan's samurai bond markets, and for generating demand that was often heavily oversubscribed. The magazine's print edition carried the ISSN 1561-4050, and its March 2020 cover listed subscription prices across the region, from HK$1,040 in Hong Kong to S$180 in Singapore.

The Triple A awards: country, regional and sustainable finance

The Asset is best known for the Triple A awards. The magazine calls its annual Triple A recognition the industry's most prestigious awards for banking, finance, treasury and the capital markets, and says that, as the financial multimedia group with the widest reach among Asian issuers and global institutional investors — its own description — it has unparalleled insight forming the foundation of the awards. The awards are adjudicated by The Asset's board of editors, described in award citations as collectively having several decades' worth of experience evaluating industry awards in Asia, using a stringent methodology and a rigorous approach in selecting the best institutions operating within Asia.

The longest-running strand, the Triple A Country Awards, focuses on activity in domestic markets; The Asset describes the Country Awards for Sustainable Finance as more than twenty years old, with a review period running from October each year to September of the following year, and results published in an issue of The Asset and on its website. The country coverage spans Asia widely — Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India and Indonesia among the territories listed in its awards documentation. Categories have included best bank, best equity house, best debt house, best domestic bond house and best brokerage house: in Hong Kong in 2014, for example, HSBC and HSBC Securities dominated, with Hang Seng Bank named best domestic bank for a fifteenth consecutive year. Regional house and deal awards sit above the country awards — in 2013 Citi was named Best Bank and Best Loan House, UBS Best Investment Bank and Best Equity House, and HSBC Best Debt and Best Bond House.

Beyond the country awards: corporate, treasury and investor honours

The Triple A name extends across a family of programmes. The Triple A Corporate Awards recognise top companies in the region for all-round excellence in financial performance, management, corporate governance, social and environmental responsibility and investor relations, judged through a benchmarking process combining an electronic survey of companies with telephone interviews in which institutional investors are consulted. Global Sources, the business-to-business media company, received the Gold corporate award in The Asset's December 2016 issue, its eighth consecutive Gold award, having held Gold and Titanium awards for the previous seven years — an example of how winning companies build their own records around the programme. Transaction banking and treasury are covered by dedicated awards: Bank of China won The Asset's Best Service Provider in Trade Finance in China prize for the seventh time in 2013, and the Triple A Treasurise Awards were still being celebrated with a Hong Kong dinner in 2026, honouring liquidity management, digital transformation, risk management and cross-border treasury innovation.

Investors and fund managers have their own strand. The Triple A Investor and Fund Management Awards recognise Asia's top investors, fund managers and asset management firms; the 2016 edition was dominated, the magazine reported, by the theme of manoeuvring around volatility in China's stock market. Private banking, wealth management and investment awards have likewise been presented under the Triple A banner, and sustainable capital markets awards honour the region's green and sustainable financing, with winners announced in recent years — during the Covid period — by livestream for the first time. The proliferation of strands follows the magazine's coverage: each major community it writes for has a corresponding Triple A programme.

Asset Benchmark Research and the Astute Investors rankings

Beneath the awards sits a research operation, Asset Benchmark Research, whose surveys both inform the awards and produce rankings in their own right. The most distinctive is its ranking of the Most Astute Investors in Asian local currency bonds. The published methodology explains how it works: in the 2022 exercise, almost 150 individuals — analysts, economists, strategists, salespeople and traders in Asian local currency bonds — were invited to nominate the ten most astute investors, based on their knowledge of the credits and markets, their trading skill and their acumen in making investment decisions, with nominations then subject to rating. Results are published for the region as a whole and by market, including Greater China, Hong Kong dollar and Singapore dollar bonds.

This survey-based method — asking market participants to judge one another, then aggregating the verdicts — is characteristic of The Asset's approach to evaluation across its programmes. Issuers and investors are consulted through the Asset Benchmark Surveys, companies are surveyed electronically and interviewed, and the board of editors adjudicates. The Asset thus functions not only as a reporter of Asian finance but as one of its scorekeepers, a role that gives a relatively small Hong Kong publishing company an outsized presence in the marketing of banks and companies across the region, whose award announcements — from Hong Kong corporates to mainland banks — cite its judgements as independent endorsement.

A multimedia operation beyond the print magazine

The Asset now presents itself as more than a print title. Its own retrospective described it as an integrated multimedia company serving a community of leading corporate and financial decision-makers in Asia, and its website reflects that description, organising current coverage by theme rather than by issue. Sections visible on the site include Treasury and Capital Markets, Wealth, Asia Connect, TechTalk — covering technology subjects such as data centres, fintech and digital payments — an ESG Forum, and On The Move, its record of senior appointments across Asian finance. Awards results and event coverage are published on the same site, and during the Covid period even its awards announcements adapted, with the board of editors announcing the Triple A Sustainable Capital Markets Regional Awards results by livestream for the first time. Print, digital publishing, research surveys, awards and live events are therefore not separate businesses for The Asset, but parts of a single operation built around the same issuer and investor community.

Hong Kong base, events and standing

The Asset is a Hong Kong institution in the literal sense: its awards ceremonies and summits are held in the city, and its events draw the region's issuers and bankers to Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority's deputy chief executive addressed its second Asia Treasury and Trade Summit in Hong Kong in 2016, thanking The Asset for hosting the summit in the city again and welcoming overseas guests — evidence of the convening power its events had acquired with regulators as well as market participants. Its Triple A dinners have been held at venues such as the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong, where the 2013 regional house and deal winners were revealed in what the magazine called an Oscar-style ceremony before the who's who of Asia's capital markets.

Descriptions from outside the magazine confirm its standing in its niche. A 2016 award announcement called The Asset a renowned English monthly financial magazine in Asia and Hong Kong, then in its sixteenth year of Triple A awards; a Hong Kong bank described it as a leading English financial magazine in Asia, its Triple A Country Award its most important selection of the year and well known within the region and the international financial market; and a wealth award recipient in 2014 called it an authoritative and well-read publication among investors and financial institutions in Asia, and at that time the largest circulated finance publication for Asian issuers. Founded as the region rebuilt from crisis in 1999, led for more than two decades by the same editor-in-chief, and anchored by the Triple A awards and Asset Benchmark Research, The Asset has made itself part of the machinery by which Asian finance measures — and markets — its own excellence.