It is widely known that China’s wealth management industry has two faces: one looking out (the offshore part) and one gazing in (the onshore part). Fewer realise India, and indeed the broader subcontinent – a region full of large, fast-growing developing economies with strict capital controls – works in much the same way.
On one side, there is a profitable and growing onshore wealth-management business that domestic players and international private banks tussle over. On the other, there is the market for serving global non-resident Indians (NRIs), many of them owners of assets and property in multiple countries. Bankers will tell you the latter is many times bigger than the former.
The very concept of the NRI is hard to define. It is a vast and ever-growing diaspora, certainly. Some families left the subcontinent when it was under British rule, settling down in the likes of London or New York. Others fled India and its troubled economy in the 1970s, moving to the places such as Africa and Asia.