Family Office
RBS gets set to take ABN Amro's Indian WM business
Royal Bank of Scotland to have five Indian private-client centers
by 2010. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which is about 70%
owned by the U.K. taxpayer thanks to recent U.K.-government
bailouts, has won regulatory approval to operate as a wealth
manager in India through the local private-client business it
acquired from ABN Amro over a year ago.
"As part of our expansion plans we are looking at distribution of
wealth products under the brand name of Royal Wealth Management
and currently we have two outlets in Mumbai," Vasantha Kumar,
head of marketing and communications at ABN Amro Bank India, told
the Indian publication LiveMint in an email last week.
Other asset products
RBS plans to establish three more Royal Wealth Management
planning centers in India this year. "Apart from distributing
wealth-management products, RBS Financial Services will also sell
other asset products and enter the business of collection of
non-performing assets," says a senior RBS staffer in India.
India's banking regulator and central bank, the Reserve Bank of
India , rejected a bid over the summer by RBS to register as a
non-bank financial-service provider in its own right and as a
joint venture partner of its private-banking subsidiary
coutts.com Coutts as a "backdoor entry for a bank" in India's
closely controlled banking regime.
A consortium of RBS, the Dutch-Belgian Fortis and Spain's
Santander acquired the assets of Dutch lender ABN Amro in October
2007. In India, RBS acquired the wholesale, retail-brokerage and
private-banking businesses; Fortis is set to run ABN Amro's
Indian asset-management unit.
ABN Amro has been operating in India -- in one form or another --
since 1920. It has 9,000 employees in 28 branches in the
country.
By 2012, India's wealth managers could be serving a market of 42
million households with $1 trillion in investable assets,
according to a 2007 estimate by Celent, a Boston-based
market-research firm. India's wealth-management marketplace was
worth about $500 billion in the middle of 2007.
In June 2008, an RBS credit-strategy team set off a wave of anger
and incredulity when it predicted that the S&P 500 -- then at
about 1350 -- would fall around 22% to 1050 by Labor Day. Of
course nothing of the sort happened: the S&P was comfortably
north of 1250 on the first Monday in September -- and it wasn't
until early October that it fell like a brick through 1050. The
U.S. equity gauge now stands at about 830. -FWR
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