Edelweiss’s Wealth Management team, led by president Ashish Kehair, is not afraid to say the quiet part out loud when asked about their 2021 strategy. “It’s all about leveraging opportunities in a crisis.”
Kehair is unapologetic about his belief that disruption on the scale of 2020 was a terrible thing to waste. His business? “It is rolling,” he notes, a description supported by the 43% cumulative annualized growth rate in assets under advice to nearly $22 billion in the first quarter of India’s 2021 fiscal year.
Covid-19 chaos didn’t get in the way of Edelweiss offering clients a sixth consecutive year of heady growth – from $2.5 billion in 2015 – thanks to its agility and consistency in delivering an ever-evolving wealth management proposition.
It helps that Edelweiss is almost linearly focused on the segment of India’s population likely to benefit most from 2021 – the nation’s wealthiest families. Roughly 2,500 of them.
Though the company provides a broad range of financial products and services to a reasonably diverse group of high net worth clients, including individuals, corporations and myriad institutions, its work in the family office space is what grabs Asiamoney’s attention.
From the broader Edelweiss Group, clients will find many services under the company’s roof: asset management; wealth management; corporate credit; retail credit; asset reconstruction; life insurance; and general insurance.
Kehair’s team is where the wealthiest families go, to capture opportunities and trends in the financial markets and to protect them from risks in a volatile world.
In 2020, Covid disruptions brought challenges, including the compression of revenues and an increase in costs, says Kehair, and a “survival of the fittest” mindset that tested banks’ competence around technology and business continuity planning. On the bright side, there was an acceleration in digital transformation, boosting productivity and improving efficiency and client engagement.
In the year ahead, Edelweiss plans to maintain its edge by increasing its role in capital raising, and its offerings of structured credit products and services – from tax advisory, treasury management and currency management, to investment and real estate advice.
That has primed Edelweiss for what Kehair’s team is convinced will happen next: everything coming back with a bang. Good news for those 2,500 families and prospective ones looking to put the next crisis to good use.