For most of July, his phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The head of a Mumbai-based family office, who oversees more than Rs 3,000 crore ($340 million) in assets under management (AUM), was exhausted.

The designated relationship managers from eight wealth-management firms, such as Nuvama, Kotak, 360 One, ASK, Sanctum, and Ambit, were calling him relentlessly. And all had the same pitch: to apply for real-estate investment trust (Reit) Knowledge Realty’s IPO through their platform.

“Their pitch was, ‘this is a cool new product, and you get to own a piece of commercial real estate without high capex.’ They were even ready to let go of the 1.25% commission, so long as I ‘please do a deal with them’,” he said.

This has become wealth managers’ drill for every new security, Reit, new company, or fund on the block.

They identify the rich (net worth of $3–12 million) and ultra-rich (net worth of over $12 million)—about 500,000 and 35,000 households, respectively. Then, the reach-outs begin: through events, cold-calling, or via social-media platforms like Linkedin. The reason for this in an industry where push tactics rarely work is huge targets for relationship managers.

Take financial-services conglomerate Anand Rathi Group. “They’d tell their relationship manager, ‘get Rs 1 crore worth of investments from your clients and get 50 such clients in a year’,” said a former executive at the firm. But when everyone is chasing the same client base, it’s not as simple, he added.

After all, opportunity may have grown, but so has competition.

In 2024, the number of wealth managers at private-banking and wealth-management firms crossed 10,000 for the first time, per Asian Private Banker, a data platform. Wealth managers working for the top 30 private banks and wealth- and asset-management firms together managed $800 billion.

The market has gotten progressively more crowded over time. There are banks, such as Kotak Wealth, ICICI Private Banking, and Barclays, that control 15% of the market, according to a July 23 report by equity-research firm Bernstein. Brokers, such as Nuvama and 360 One have bolted on wealth-management units. Multi-family offices like Waterfield and Entrust cater to the top tier. And then there are newer players such as Sanctum, Neo, Incred, and Equirus.

The new players often undercut on price to get in the door, but with fewer in-house products than the big banks, the advice is the product—and the relationship has to pay for itself.