Over the decades, one truth has remained constant in finance: the best outcomes emerge from consistent, thoughtful progress. While the core of private wealth management continues to rest on human insight and trust, the tools delivering this value are evolving at a rapid pace. Among these, digital transformation stands out as a powerful force for betterment, bringing greater intelligence, speed, and precision to every client interaction.

As Head of the International Business at Nuvama, Vivek Sharma is driving a pivotal chapter in the firm’s international expansion - bridging the needs of India’s globally dispersed wealthy with a cross-border platform that is fitfor-purpose, robust, and regulatory-compliant, while also opening the door wider to global investors seeking structured access to India’s fast-growing asset markets. In a recent interview with Hubbis, Sharma outlined how this strategy is being implemented through a phased rollout across major financial hubs - beginning in 2024 with Dubai and extending it to Singapore in 2025. Presence in these two locations, will enable Nuvama to cover both middle east and Asia as key hubs for the offshore business.

Debt allocation in a UHNI client portfolio can be broadly classified as ‘High Grade’ and ‘High Yield’. This allocation is deployed via bonds, NCDs, mutual funds, REITs/InvITs and AIFs. Mutual fund allocation is generally classified as ‘High Grade’ as typical debt funds being looked by UHNI clients are money market funds for short term allocation, corporate bond fund for medium term allocation and select Gilt funds for long term duration. For temporary parking, overnight, liquid and arbitrage funds continue to be preferred choices. It may be worthwhile to note that overall flows to debt mutual funds have moderated over last 2 quarters post changes in taxation for such funds.

In addition to planning for succession, the two trends we have been seeing off late is geographical diversification of investments and obtaining residency by investment of a foreign country. With the changing times, the needs of the UHNIs are no longer plain and simple planning for succession. While that remains at the forefront, UHNIs are exploring setting up structures outside India to make investments in foreign markets. Also, with geographical diversification of assets and intending to have a Plan B for themselves, we have seen UHNIs exploring obtaining residency of a foreign country by making investments in that country with which they can travel hassle free any number of times in a year or settle in that country, if need arises. Some clients are also exploring getting citizenship of another country. Since India doesn’t allow dual citizenship, this trend is slow as compared to residency by investment abroad.

As 2024 draws to a close, India’s private wealth management industry stands at the crossroads of significant evolution. Alok Saigal, President & Head Nuvama Private, reflects on a year marked by the rap expansion of wealth into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, a growing demand for offshore investments, and the rising complexity of client needs.

Leading Wealth Managers are upbeat about the India Story, albeit with some hiccups. The need of the hour for investors: Disciplined asset allocation. In a volatile market environment where outflows by foreign institutional investors have  crossed 1 Lakh crore- surpassing the 2008 crisis levels- investors face a challenging yet opportunity laden landscape.