Indian wealth has gone global. Has the family office kept up?

For years, I have watched Indian family wealth outgrow the business that created it. I have seen this from both sides: as someone who built a business, and later as someone who had to think about how to manage the wealth that business created. I quickly realised that these are two very different jobs.

When I started out, most family wealth in India sat in the operating business. Managing the business well was, in many ways, the same as managing the family’s wealth. That is no longer the case.

A wealthy Indian family today may have investments across public and private markets, private equity, venture capital, fixed income, real estate, gold, commodities among other investments. These may sit across multiple entities, banks, custodians and jurisdictions. The family itself may also be spread across countries, with the next generation studying, working or settling overseas.

The numbers tell us how quickly this landscape is changing. Knight Frank estimated that India had 13,263 ultra-high-net-worth individuals in 2023 with wealth exceeding $30 million, and projected that number to rise by more than 50% to 19,908 by 2028. The EY–Julius Baer family office report points to the same broad expansion in Indian private wealth.

The international footprint of Indian families is widening too. Henley estimated a net outflow of around 4,300 millionaires from India in 2024, while noting that many relocating Indians continue to retain business interests and homes in the country.

What this means is quite simple: Indian wealth is becoming increasingly global and the way we manage it has to keep pace.

A young institution managing increasingly complex wealth

Globally as wealth grows and becomes more complex, families set up family offices to “institutionalise” its management by bringing structure to this complexity. In India, however, the family office institution itself is still relatively young.

There were an estimated 45 published family offices in India in 2018. By 2024, published estimates put that number at close to 300. That is remarkable growth in a relatively short period. But the real number of Indian family offices is considerably larger when you consider that many family offices are embedded in family businesses or simply operate below the radar.

But setting up a family office and institutionalising one are two different things. PwC found that only 63% of Indian family business leaders had formal governance structures in place.

As wealth grows, so does the need for clearly defined governance, investment processes, succession planning and accountability. Decisions that could once sit with the founder or a small

group of trusted advisors become harder to manage informally when assets, family members and advisors are spread across different locations.

I have seen this in my own experience. The question is not simply who manages the money. It is whether the family has built a structure that can continue to work as the wealth, the family and the number of people involved all grow.

The test is not how well things run while the founder is in the room. It is what holds when the founder is not.

Knowing what you own is becoming harder

There is another part of this complexity that receives less attention: having a reliable, consolidated view of the family’s wealth.

We experienced this firsthand in our own family office. As investments grew across asset classes and entities, financial tracking, entity management and accounting and tax compliance became increasingly difficult. Data sat in different places and had to be brought together before we could get a single aggregated view and with data turning to actionable insights.

That problem eventually led us to build the technology that became Asset Vantage. It began as something we needed for ourselves, long before we thought of offering it to other families in India and globally.

Over time, I realised that our problem was not unique. Family offices globally were dealing with much the same challenge.

Technology can help solve part of this. But I don’t believe technology by itself makes a family office institutionalised. What matters is having reliable information, clear processes and governance that allow the right people to make informed decisions. Technology should support that discipline, not replace it.

The next generation will test what we have built

This becomes even more important as India approaches a significant intergenerational transfer of wealth. EY and Julius Baer estimate that around $1.3 trillion could pass between generations in India over the next decade.

The next generation is inheriting more than financial assets. It is inheriting businesses, investment portfolios, structures and responsibilities that may extend across several countries. It is also entering the family office with different expectations around transparency, technology, professional management and the way capital should be deployed.

That transition will test the institutions families have built around their wealth.

Our group has spent more than five decades building engineering and tech businesses, and one lesson has stayed with me: what works at one stage of growth does not necessarily work at the next. You have to build for where you are going, not where you have been. I think the same is true of family wealth.

Indian families have created extraordinary wealth over the past few decades. That wealth is now more diversified, sophisticated and global than ever before. The family office has to mature with it.

For many families, that work is still underway. The capital has moved ahead, the family office institution now has to catch up.

(The author is founder & chairman, UNIDEL Group. Views are personal.)