But an even bigger challenge came about at the turn of the millennium when the dot-com bubble burst. “Everybody was crazy; any company with a dot-com name could go up a few hundred per cent in a short period of time,” says Chan. “And then the bubble crashed. That’s another good lesson we learned; things are never as rosy as they seem, and sometimes things are too good to be true.”
Rickie Chan’s career as a private banker has been shaped by crises from the very start. The Hong Kong native moved back home from the US in 1996 after graduating from the University of Chicago the year prior, starting at Goldman Sachs just months before the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) began.
“It was a very good learning experience as a junior person in the banking industry,” says Chan. “That gave me a lot of useful lessons [about] the way that I look at risk, the way that we communicate with clients during [a] crisis.”
