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.