“Providing clients with security and yield will be the goal, so we will be expanding our asset management product range, offering clients greater choice in high-growth geographies, rolling out cutting-edge asset allocation tools to help clients make suitable investment decisions and finally, investing in creating the Kingdom’s most advanced on-line brokerage trading system, offering new portfolio analysis tools and features which have not yet been seen in Saudi Arabia before,” Raul Biancardi, managing director and COO of NCB Capital, told Arab News.

The executive said NCB Capital experienced growth across the board in 2010 despite effects from the global recession.

“The global downturn obviously affected our clients, but the impact depended on their asset allocations. Our largest clients had invested with international banks in the US and Europe the most of these positions were hit very hard. We saw many clients repatriating capital while others stemmed the flow of capital overseas.”

In February, NCB Capital launched the first Shariah-compliant, US dollar-denominated open-ended fund, "to provide investors an opportunity to participate in a new expanding asset class-sukuk,” the investment bank’s managing director of wealth and asset management, Jawdat Al-Halabi reportedly said at the launching.

“We saw particular growth in local fixed income and equity markets with many of these investments in Shariah-compliant products,” Biancardi stated.

Into next year, NCB Capital said that it foresees continued growth, particularly in Shariah-compliant funds and will continue to work to gain market share which will end 2010 at 37 percent, compared to 33 percent at the end of 2009.

“We will also continue to offer investment products and services to institutional clients outside of Saudi Arabia through our London and Cairo subsidiaries and expect to expand this business as well in 2011,” Biancardi added.

The executive also said that NCB Capital is currently offering market-leading research to investors outside of Saudi Arabia, expanding their client base into the GCC and beyond, but ruled out any physical expansion plans over the course of next year saying, “However, we are not planning to expand our physical presence outside of the Kingdom in 2011,” he said.