Julius Baer says aggressively ramping up India wealth business

Julius Baer Group Ltd. sees India’s wealth market as a large opportunity even as private banking margins shrink globally, its top official in the country said.

The nation’s $600 billion wealth industry is growing at 12% annually, and only a quarter of that wealth is currently managed professionally, Umang Papneja, managing director and chief executive of the Swiss wealth manager’s Indian unit, said in a Bloomberg TV interview on Thursday.

“Julius Baer wants to be a part of that, and we are looking at aggressively ramping up the India business,” he said. Almost three individuals each day are joining the 13,000-strong group of Indians with a net worth of more than $30 million, according to Papneja.

Global wealth managers, including UBS Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG and Julius Baer, are among firms that have been hiring private bankers to serve clients from the world’s fifth-biggest economy. HSBC Holdings Plc is poised to start its private wealth operations in the country this year.

Papneja said he is seeing more appetite for alternative investment products from India’s wealthy, who traditionally invested mainly in mutual funds and fixed-income products.