Corporate bank stoops to conquer by laying major-market retail groundwork. In another indication of the growing importance of private-client business to Indian financial institutions, Mumbai-based Yes Bank, traditionally a specialist in corporate and institutional banking, is making a push into wealth management.

The bank is targeting mass-affluent and high-net-worth clients as well as small business with annual turnovers of up to $2.3 million. To get to them it's laying a retail-banking foundation in major centers in the subcontinent.

Yes, yes, yes

"We aim to have 60 branches and 75 offsite ATM centers across Mumbai [and the greater Delhi region] by June 2007," Yes Bank's president of retail banking and wealth management Suhail Kazmi, told the Indian newspaper DNA last week.

Meanwhile Yes Bank has inaugurated several groups to cater to different wealth bands. Yes Prosperity targets those with an annual income of at least $11,300; Yes First is for those with a "potential relationship value" of over $57,000; Yes Private is aimed at individuals with a potential relationship value of $1 million.

Some of these numbers may seem a low for the red-carpet treatment, but -- Yes Prosperity clients aside -- they're highly desirable private clients by Indian standards. In India a mass-affluent individual has investable assets of between $50,000 and $299,000, according to Datamonitor, a London-based market research firm. Indians in the high-net-worth bracket have at least $300,000 in investable assets.

By the end of this year, says Datamonitor, mass affluent and high-net-worth Indians will number around 1 million and hold assets worth about $200 billion all told. -FWR

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