T.O.-based bank wants in on south Asia's growth, expatriate opportunities. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has joined a growing crowd of offshore financial companies looking for a piece of India's fast growing wealth-management market.

"India is showing an increasing demand for areas in which RBC has competitive strengths: infrastructure and project finance, energy, metals and mining, structured products, currency and bond trading, and wealth-management services," says RBC's president and CEO Gordon Nixon, commenting on the Canadian bank's new office in Mumbai.

The Mumbai office will provide capital-markets services, correspondent banking and trade finance to Indian financial institutions and wealth-management services to private clients.

Bay Street boys

In 2006, India's population of U.S.-dollar millionaires increased by 20.5% to about 100,000, according to the World Wealth Report, which is co-published by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini. Only Singapore churned out millionaires at a faster pace.

By 2012, India's wealth managers could be serving a market of 42 million households with $1 trillion in investable assets, according to Celent, a Boston-based market-research firm.

But then Celent is looking at a broad private-client market that goes from those with at least $30 million in investable assets to "mass-market" investors with as little as $5,000 in liquid money.

After the Chinese, Indians make up Canada's largest population of Asian immigrants. By getting in on the ground in India, Nixon says RBC will be in a good position to help Indian-Canadians invest back into India's surging economy.

Akhauri Sinha is in charge of Toronto-based RBC's overall activities in India. Dipendarra Singh will serve as head of its wealth-management business.

RBC, which owns Minneapolis-based brokerage RBC Dain Rauscher, brings in a quarter of its revenue from its U.S. activities, another 15% or so from its Beijing branch and an asset-management joint venture in China. The rest of its sales -- about 60% -- come from Canadian operations.

Among foreign firms that have entered the Indian wealth-management space in recent months are Zurich-based EFG International, New York-based AIG and Sydney-based Macquarie Bank. -FWR

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