Barclays Wealth India grew client AuM by a third last year and is on the front foot to hire talented private bankers.

Barclays Wealth, the UK wealth manager, has
poached a director for its Chennai office as its head of India outlines plans
to grow headcount by as much as a fifth this year.

Asha
Mathen joined Barclays Wealth India as director in the Chennai office last
month. She was previously a vice president at the Indian private wealth
management division of German lender Deutsche Bank. At Deutsche, she set up
the Chennai branch and headed the South and East regions for the bank. 

Mathen
started her career as an officer in the Reserve Bank of India and moved on to
ICICI Bank where she was regional head for Chennai, overseeing 42 branches.

The
move compounds the bank’s strategy to expand aggressively in the region over
the next few years.

Chief
executive of Barclays Wealth’s India office, Satya Bansal, told WealthBriefingAsia
in an exclusive interview last week that the firm has ambitions to swell its
private banker ranks by 20 per cent annually. This will take relationship
manager headcount to nearly 50 by the end of this year.

“We
have been on expansion mode for the last three years and we continue to do that
today. We have been hiring people from traditional private banking backgrounds but
also other corporate bankers and investment bankers who can cater to our
entrepreneurial clients and family businesses,” said Bansal, who is based in Mumbai. Barclays Wealth India has a presence in Chennai, Mumbai, New Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore, and has plans to grow all its divisions. 

He
added: “The market is growing by 20-25 per cent each year but it is quite fragmented
and there are no dominant wealth players to speak of.”

Most
global wealth players have set up a presence within the last five years, but
private banks own just a small fraction of the Indian wealth pool.

Bansal
said: “Around $15-20 billion of Indian wealth is currently managed in India.
This compares with a market capital of $1.5 trillion of companies listed on the
Bombay Stock Exchange. Even if only a tenth of this is in the hands of the
individuals, you can see there is a huge opportunity.”

He
added that most onshore Indian wealth is currently handled by product providers
- so there is a lot of room for private banks to service the Indian wealth
market holistically.

Bansal
said client assets under management grew by 35 per cent last year, without giving
numbers. As of 31 March 2011, Barclays Wealth had £166 billion of assets under
management. It does not break down its AuM regionally.

According
to the most recent Merrill Lynch CapGemini World Wealth Report, the
number of millionaires in India surged 21 per cent to a record 153,000 in 2010,
making the country's high net worth individual population 12th largest
across the globe, up from 14^th the previous year. Last year GDP
soared 9 per cent.