Hong Kong's investment banking sector is facing a real test: its project pipeline is completely full, but it is badly understaffed.
In 2026, Hong Kong stock IPO (Initial Public Offering) continues to boom. Public data shows that as of September 6, there have been 105 companies listed on the Hong Kong stock IPO market so far this year, a year-on-year increase of 77.97%; the IPO fundraising scale reached HK$355.848 billion, a year-on-year increase of 156.22%.
Against this backdrop, the reporter learned from interviews that the shortage of investment banking practitioners in Hong Kong has become prominent, with sponsor signatories being particularly scarce, and the phenomenon of mutual poaching of sponsor signatories in the industry is relatively common.
Shen Qiao, head of the investment banking department at a foreign-funded brokerage, told the Economic Observer that two sponsor signatories in his department have voluntarily left their jobs this year, but through internal training and external recruitment, the total number of sponsor signatories in the department has remained basically stable. According to Shen Qiao's understanding, the turnover rate of sponsor signatories at some peer institutions even reaches 30% to 40%.
Shen Qiao said that some peers previously took on many projects that they should not have taken on or exceeded their own undertaking capacity, and could only poach external sponsor signatories everywhere, but the investment bank he works for does not plan to recruit people blindly in the current period.
The reporter learned from interviews that the gap of sponsor signatories has triggered a chain reaction. Some investment banks short of sponsor signatories have begun to take the initiative to take on the role of overall coordinator, a position that does not require a sponsor qualification, or choose to withdraw from projects directly. An investment banking practitioner told the reporter that against the background of a substantial increase in the number of IPO projects and clearer regulatory requirements for the resources of key sponsor personnel, sponsor institutions will review their existing project portfolios and resource allocation more carefully than in the past, and become more stringent and prudent when selecting projects.
In addition, the interviewed investment banking practitioners said that in the medium and long term, investment banks still need to establish their own talent training system, so that young investment bankers can truly have the opportunity to fully participate in IPOs and gradually take on more responsibilities.
Shortage of Personnel
Shen Qiao told the Economic Observer that in the few years before 2023, the overall performance of the Hong Kong stock market was sluggish, while the market has picked up in the past two years, and the project schedules of all sponsor institutions are very full. However, the investment bank he works for will not blindly recruit relevant personnel just because projects are piling up and sponsor signatories are in short supply, but will appropriately supplement sponsor signatories according to the natural flow of personnel.
The shortage of sponsor signatories mentioned by Shen Qiao is related to the relevant guidelines issued by the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong to sponsor institutions in early 2026, which limits the number of active projects that sponsor signatories (key personnel of sponsors) can advance simultaneously — if the key personnel of any sponsor institution supervise or participate in 6 or more active listing engagement projects at the same time, the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong will generally consider that the sponsor institution has insufficient resources, unless there are very special reasons recognized by the regulator. This regulatory measure has consolidated project quality from the source, but also made the already scarce sponsor signatory resources even more strained.
A 2026 mid-year research report from the Securities Association of China mentioned that there are 442 registered sponsor signatories in Hong Kong, and a total of 8 investment banks in the whole market have 10 or more sponsor signatories. These 8 institutions have a total of 115 sponsor signatories, accounting for 26% of the market total. Among them, CITIC Securities has 24 sponsor signatories, ranking first with a market share of 5.43%; CICC, Huatai International and Haitong International rank second to fourth with 21, 16 and 12 signatories respectively. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are tied for fifth, each with 11 sponsor signatories, while UBS Securities and JPMorgan Chase are tied for seventh, each with 10 sponsor signatories.
Shen Qiao said that on the one hand, customers now care whether investment banks have qualified sponsor signatories, and on the other hand, they are very worried about the frequent turnover of project execution team members. If the team expands too fast, the risk of personnel turnover will also rise, which is also a situation that customers do not want to see. In addition, it is necessary to consider the cyclical nature of investment banking projects. If the number of projects falls in the future, the demand for sponsor signatories will likely fall synchronously. If a large number of personnel are recruited now, how to deal with these people then is a problem that needs to be carefully considered.
Shen Qiao also said that the sponsor institution he works for currently pays more attention to the training of internal talents, and three internally trained personnel have obtained sponsor signatory licenses this year.
Liang Youting, Vice President of the Greater China Division of the Australian Society of Certified Public Accountants, told the Economic Observer that in the short term, external recruitment is still the fastest way for investment banks to supplement key personnel including sponsor signatories. Liang Youting is currently in charge of Hong Kong capital market business at a large Chinese-funded investment bank, and he sees a very realistic contradiction at the moment: the market's demand for key personnel such as sponsor signatories has risen rapidly in a short period of time, but qualified and sufficiently experienced talents cannot grow rapidly synchronously.
Liang Youting said that on the one hand, under normal circumstances, the access path for sponsor signatory qualifications requires applicants to have at least five years of relevant corporate financing experience, and have assumed substantial responsibilities in at least two completed Hong Kong IPO projects in the past five years. This creates a time lag in the market supply of key personnel in actual operation.
On the other hand, to truly train a person who can independently supervise the transaction team and assume the responsibility of sponsorship work, it is necessary to let him go through the whole project execution process, including how to conduct due diligence, how to handle regulatory issues, how to judge complex problems, and how to manage the entire transaction team, none of which can be solved by training alone.
Therefore, Liang Youting believes that investment banks can solve the personnel shortage problem through recruitment or internal resource allocation in the short term, but at the same time, how to retain the existing key personnel is also a skill that needs to be mastered.
Chain Reaction
In fact, in addition to sponsor signatories, there are also quite a few gaps among front-line staff.
Against the background that more and more mainland enterprises are listing in Hong Kong and there are more and more "A+H" projects, many mainland enterprises will choose leading Chinese-funded investment banks as one of their sponsor institutions in the process of Hong Kong stock IPO. Ms. Chen is a senior manager at a leading Chinese-funded investment bank, and two of her colleagues at the execution level in the same group have left their jobs one after another this year. She told reporters that her daily execution workload in projects is already quite large, and with the recent departure of two colleagues, the workload she has to take on is even greater, and now even time off in lieu has to be postponed.
Statistics from Ryan Capital show that as of August 2026, a total of 48 brokerages have participated in sponsorship work as listing sponsors or joint sponsors in the past two years, including 31 mainland-funded brokerages, 11 foreign-funded brokerages, and 6 Hong Kong-funded brokerages. In the first 8 months of 2026 and the past year (as of August 2026), CICC ranked first in both periods with 35 and 56 sponsored listed companies respectively. CITIC Securities, Huatai International, and Guotai Junan ranked second to fourth, with more than 18 sponsored enterprises in the past year. In the past year, the number of enterprises sponsored by foreign investment banks was all in single digits, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, UBS Securities, JPMorgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank sponsoring 9, 8, 7, 6, and 6 enterprises respectively.
Shen Qiao admitted that in recent years, Chinese-funded investment banks have invested a lot of resources in mainland enterprises and accumulated a considerable reserve of Hong Kong IPO projects, which has brought certain pressure to the business of foreign investment banks. A few foreign investment banks, under the dual pressure of project acquisition and the number of sponsor signatories, have begun to take the initiative to take on non-sponsor roles such as overall coordinator. But from their own strategy, this is not a priority, and they tend not to take on non-sponsor businesses. They always believe that sponsor institutions should tilt their optimal resources to their core projects, and the priority of sponsored projects must be higher than that of non-sponsored projects.
Liang Youting said that sponsor institutions with a large number of projects will have a greater demand for relevant personnel including sponsor signatories. The key is to see how many active projects an institution is executing at the same time, and whether qualified key personnel including sponsor signatories and the transaction team are sufficient to support these projects. If the business volume grows rapidly while the key personnel and overall execution capacity do not increase synchronously, the investment bank will face resource pressure. Therefore, the relevant regulatory requirements will actually prompt the entire industry to pay more attention to the balance between project quantity, quality and professional resources.
Shen Qiao said that some investment banks with aggressive styles and previous large-scale project expansion have even withdrawn from projects due to the limited quota of sponsor signatories. In his view, the core demand of regulation is to ensure project execution quality. From last year to this year, some investment banks have withdrawn from projects, which is caused by different factors such as sponsorship issues, commercial arrangements, customer selection, and internal resource allocation, in addition to the sponsor signatory problem.
The reporter's incomplete statistics based on public application documents found that the number of sponsor change cases this year has increased significantly compared with the past two years. If "sponsor change" is defined as when the same listed-to-be company resubmits its application or updates its prospectus, at least one of the original sponsor institutions withdraws or is replaced, excluding the situation of simply adding sponsors, there were at least 3 cases in 2024, at least 5 cases in 2025, and at least 18 cases so far in 2026.
In this regard, Liang Youting said that for investment banks that originally had a large number of project reserves and relatively tight qualified key personnel, they will usually rearrange the priority of projects: projects with high maturity and a clear listing schedule in the near future will generally be allocated resources first; the progress of some projects that are still in the early stage and have no clear listing schedule may be adjusted.
More Stringent Project Screening
Hong Kong investment banking practitioners interviewed by the reporter said that after the release of the relevant guidelines of the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong, sponsor institutions will be more stringent in project screening, and factors such as the financing scale, quality, and growth potential of projects will all be taken into consideration.
Shen Qiao said that the situation of manpower pressure in some investment banks is mainly due to the fact that personnel reserve and training cannot keep up with the pace of business expansion, and the pre-project access standards were too loose. The competition for really good projects is indeed very fierce, but the investment bank he works for has its own requirements in project screening. The reason why they choose not to take on some projects is based on the judgment of project adaptability, which is essentially a matter of corporate strategy choice.
Shen Qiao also said that not all of the 300 to 500 potential projects in the market can finally land. Many projects may not be successfully issued even if they submit applications, but as long as the declaration is submitted, it will occupy the sponsor's quota.
For Shen Qiao, his investment bank has several requirements for selecting projects: first, to assess whether the project meets the listing conditions on the Hong Kong stock market and can obtain subscriptions from global institutional investors, and at the same time evaluate the future development prospects of the company to judge whether it can bring considerable returns to investors; second, from the perspective of the market environment, the capital market industry preference focuses on hard technology, where the market track has high activity, strong investor attention, and the growth rate of enterprises is relatively faster; third, from the perspective of internal resource allocation, team resources will be prioritized to industries supported by policies.
Liang Youting also believes that the implementation of the above regulatory guidelines means that the opportunity cost of qualified key personnel including sponsor signatories has increased. Each additional active sponsorship project will actually occupy part of the relatively limited core resources of the investment bank, so investment banks will naturally be more stringent when selecting projects.
The scale of financing is also a factor to be considered, because it directly affects project fees and the return of resource input. In Liang Youting's view, there is a very practical problem here — the core workload of an IPO does not change proportionally with the scale of financing. No matter what the final financing of the project is, a large number of work such as due diligence, listing documents, regulatory communication, and internal approval must be completed, and the number of core personnel that need to be invested will not differ much.
In addition, Liang Youting also mentioned that when an investment bank judges whether an IPO project is worth taking on, in addition to the financing scale, it will also look at the quality of the company, industry prospects, listing feasibility, customer relationship, and space for future cooperation. In his view, for some high-growth industries such as artificial intelligence, robotics, semiconductors, and innovative drugs, if the enterprise itself has good quality, certain technical barriers and long-term development space, even if the current financing scale is not particularly large, investment banks still have sufficient reasons to take on the project.
(At the request of the interviewee, Shen Qiao is a pseudonym)
This article is from the WeChat official account "Economic Observer", author: Lao Yingying, published with authorization from 36Kr.