As a business, corporate trust doesn’t usually make headlines. It operates in the quiet spaces between borrowers and lenders. Yet without independent trustees to stand between issuers and investors, the vast market for Asian debt would seize up.
The annual Corporate Trust Servicing Insights survey suggests that the qualities clients prize in their trustees are evolving in ways that will reshape the competitive landscape.
Conducted by Asset Benchmark Research ( ABR ), the Corporate Trust Servicing Insights 2026 report, which gathered responses from nearly 150 market participants across Hong Kong, mainland China, Singapore, South Korea and Indonesia, offers a rare window into the preferences of corporate trust clients. Hong Kong, the region’s dominant venue for corporate trust transactions, supplied 64% of the responses. The number of respondents have been stable over 2024, 2025, and 2026.
Asked to rank the most important factors in selecting a corporate trust service provider, respondents settled on a clear hierarchy. Track record and experience came first, followed by transaction administration, and then execution. These three have formed the bedrock of client expectations for some time, but their relative weights are shifting.
The three most important factors in choosing a service provider
Source: ABR
Most striking is the growing emphasis on track record. Over the past three years, clients have placed increasing importance on a provider’s history of successful deals. This trend is especially pronounced among sophisticated issuers with complex, multi-jurisdictional or heavily structured transaction demands.
The survey suggests that clients are scrutinizing the quality of experience more closely than ever. A trustee that has handled a high volume of plain-vanilla bond issuances may be less impressive than one that has steered through a complex asset-backed securitization or a distressed exchange.
For three consecutive years, demand for robust transaction administration capabilities has grown steadily. Clients no longer want a trustee that merely holds documents in a vault; they want one that can actively monitor compliance, flag breaches in real time, and manage the administrative machinery of a transaction for the whole life cycle.
The survey also examined a related but distinct service: escrow agency. Here the priorities are similar but not identical. The top three factors for choosing an escrow provider are custodian and safekeeping capability, track record, and execution. The ordering is revealing. In the escrow world, the safekeeping of assets ranks above all else.
The three most important factors in choosing an escrow agent
Source: ABR
While corporate trust clients have grown more focused on experience, escrow clients have grown markedly less so. The proportion of respondents citing track record and experience as a critical factor plunged from 61% in 2025 to just 42% in 2026 – a drop of nearly one-third in a single year.
Client feedback collected in the survey singled out Citibank, China Construction Bank Asia ( CCBA ) and HSBC as the most capable and experienced corporate trust service providers in the market. The praise was effusive and consistent. Their teams, clients noted, demonstrate “strong technical expertise, responsiveness, and a deep understanding of complex transaction structures, which help ensure efficient execution and high service standards”. Taken together, these qualities “continue to set a high benchmark for professionalism and reliability in the corporate trust industry”.
