Rapidly growing pools of wealth in India’s tier-two and tier-three cities remain largely underserved, according to Mitesh Shah, managing director and CEO of Equirus Family Office.
“The quality of advice and talent needed to advise these families just isn’t there,” Shah told Asian Private Banker. “They are under-tapped and under-advised. We are making a very conscious effort to reach out to these cities.”
Shah is referring to cities outside the country’s tier-one category of Mumbai, New Delhi and Bengaluru, that fall into tiers two, three and four. This includes major hubs such as Jaipur and Lucknow, emerging cities like Udaipur and Rajkot, and lesser-known towns.
The number of affluent households in tier-two and tier-three cities has increased by 76% over the last six years, reaching nearly 40 million in 2025, according to a July 2026 report by Kantar, a global market research firm, and the Indian media group Dainik Bhaskar.
This sees domestic private banks targeting private wealth in emerging cities. Private banking AUM grew 12% to reach a record high of US$860 billion in 2025, according to APB’s latest India League Tables.
Family enterprises vs tech founders
Among the growing affluent population in non-tier-one cities, wealth is primarily concentrated in family-owned enterprises, rather than the tech start-up entrepreneur-type clients found in tier-one hubs, Shah said.
“It is not with first-generation founders or CXOs; it’s actually with business families who set up businesses 10, 20, or even 40 years ago and have grown regional franchises,” he said.
Shah co-founded and heads a US$4 billion AUM multi-family office headquartered in Bengaluru, India. Formerly known as Credence Family Office, the firm was acquired by Equirus Capital, a financial services firm and investment bank, in 2025.
Shah’s firm is one of many MFOs now increasingly involved in India’s red-hot initial public offering market. The country logged 367 IPOs worth US$23 billion in 2025 – more listings than anywhere else in the world.
Most of the IPOs the firm advised on in the last 12 to 18 months were not even in tier-one cities, he said.
“In March [2026], we completed the IPO for a multi-thousand-crore IPO in a city called Rajkot in Gujarat. We are doing another in Anand, a few hundred kilometres from Ahmedabad – very much tier-three and tier-four territory,” he said. One crore is roughly 10 million rupees or about US$119,000.
“After the IPO, the proceeds come in, and that’s when the wealth solutions kick in,” Shah added.
Recycling IPO liquidity
Indian IPOs are minting millionaires in cities once considered backwaters, with most of them having never been exposed to such large amounts of money before, Shah noted.
“A high proportion of HNW families are coming from first-generation entrepreneurs having their first liquidity events,” he said. “This makes it extremely important for them to protect this capital, which, in a way, they are seeing for the first time in their lives.”
Entrepreneurs today are younger and choose to continue working post-IPO and seek advice from wealth managers in managing or reinvesting the new capital from their business into often riskier ventures, Shah said. This compares to earlier times, he added, when family offices in India managed the money of company owners who sold their business and exited.
“We have a new set of people who have made money, are relatively young, and are going back to entrepreneurship or operating businesses, and therefore need a very granular lens on the financial part of their portfolio. There is a lot of risk capital tied up in their day jobs,” said Shah.
NRI flows supported by GIFT City
Shah also expects more foreign capital to flow back into India from non-resident Indians (NRIs) amid more favourable capital structures.
“Structures were not available for capital to freely flow inward and outward… an NRI in Hong Kong, for instance, would have to navigate multiple complex structures,” he said.
NRIs have long faced investment obstacles such as strict foreign exchange hurdles, the need for regulatory approvals, and documentation requirements, to name a few. This has led other independent firms to launch platforms to streamline the process.
Developments, however, such as the nation’s Gujarat International Finance Tec-City or GIFT City, which boasts tax-free offshore banking and aims to compete with Singapore and Dubai, will provide momentum, Shah said.
“With GIFT City and other compliance and structure developments, things have been simplified,” he said.
Standard Chartered, for instance, plans to expand its CIO funds to GIFT City to offer NRIs foreign-currency investment options.
“The NRI population that was convinced about investing in India – but was shying away due to structural ambiguity – no longer faces those hurdles. There is now a much larger pool for us to tap into,” he said.