China's expanding group of high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) presents both an opportunity and a monumental challenge for global banks that are seeking to make inroads into the country's deep wealth-management market. Although some foreign banks have licenses or joint ventures that give them partial access to China's wealth-management market, they don't have the branch footprint and scale of Chinese banks. "They have very, very low market share, largely because they don't have distribution," says Sameer Chishty, a Hong Kong-based partner at Bain & Company who co-leads the firm's Financial Services practice for Greater China as well as the global Wealth Management practice.