\n One sentence cut through an hour of discussion at the Hubbis India Wealth Management Forum 2026 in Mumbai, and it came early. Asked what an adviser must be to hold the attention of a client who has already researched the firm before walking in, Thomas Stephen, Director and Head of Anand Rathi Preferred at Anand Rathi Share and Stock Brokers, began not with capability or platform but with a premise about the business itself.
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\n“Any relationships are actually earned,” he said. “There’s no relationship that is inherited.” For a panel convened around the uncomfortable proposition that a bond built with the patriarch will not automatically pass to his children, it was an unusually plain acknowledgement from a firm that has been operating in the Indian market for more than three decades. The panel, chaired by Vaanyasri Goel, Chief Investment Strategist at PACE Family Office, pressed each participant to say what they were doing differently rather than what they were calling it. Stephen’s answer turned out to be about people, and about a recruitment approach measured in years rather than quarters.\n <\/p>\n
Key Takeaways<\/p>\n
\n\tNothing Transfers Automatically: Stephen rejects the idea of an inherited client relationship, framing every relationship as something the adviser has to earn afresh.
\n\tHiring Is the Differentiator: The firm identifies individuals through clients and the wider industry, then assesses them against its own values before making an approach.
\n\tTimelines Are Long: Some advisers join within six months of first contact, others after a year, and the firm continues to track people it first approached five years ago.
\n\tLegacy Sits Inside the Proposition: The stated aim is wealth stories for life and beyond, with investment philosophy carried across generations rather than ending at the founder.
\n\tCapability Is Kept In-House: The work is delivered by employees within the group rather than through external agencies.
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\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wealth Stories for Life and Beyond<\/p>\n
Goel opened by asking each panellist to describe their proposition without reciting a corporate website. Stephen’s version placed the emphasis on continuity.<\/p>\n
“At Anand Rathi Preferred, we believe in creating wealth stories for life and beyond,” he said.<\/p>\n
He then explained why the second half of that phrase has become the operative part. “Earlier days, just creating wealth stories for life was important,” he said. “But these days it’s very important to carry those legacies, those investment decisions and philosophies, to the next generation as well.”<\/p>\n
The distinction matters. A wealth manager who succeeds only at the first task has produced a portfolio. One who succeeds at the second has produced something the family can continue to operate once the person who built it is no longer making the decisions. That requires the reasoning behind the portfolio to be transferable, not merely the assets.<\/p>\n
In practice, Stephen described a process that starts with understanding a client’s aspirations and goals, and then ensures that every investment idea or solution is framed against that need rather than presented on its own merits. He also noted that the group delivers this through its own people. “We don’t have an external agency. We have employees within the group that does it.”<\/p>\n
Anand Rathi Preferred was established fourteen years ago, within a business operating in India for more than thirty. Stephen described its founding principle in similarly unadorned terms, as client centricity and a commitment to following each client’s aspirations.<\/p>\n
The Client Who Has Already Read Everything<\/p>\n
Goel framed her question from her own position as a family office principal, noting that she chooses advisers rather than inheriting them. What, she asked, must an adviser be in 2026 to hold the attention of a client who has already read everything the firm has published about itself, and where does a firm find such people.<\/p>\n
Stephen offered his answer as a statement of belief rather than a rhetorical flourish. “I truly believe that any relationships are actually earned. There’s no relationship that is inherited. So we believe in that.”<\/p>\n
It is a more demanding position than it first appears. A firm accepting that premise cannot rely on the tenure of an existing relationship as a defence against competition, nor assume that its work with a founder buys standing with that founder’s children. Each generation is a fresh mandate.<\/p>\n
Other panellists arrived at the same conclusion from different directions. One participant argued that trust cannot be transacted at all, since you cannot sell it across a table, and has instead to be built into how a firm is structured. Another suggested the burden of adaptation falls on the adviser rather than the client, since each generation arrives with different goals and a different view of risk.<\/p>\n
Recruiting on a Five-Year View<\/p>\n
If relationships are earned by individuals, the question of who those individuals are becomes the central operating problem, and this is where Stephen was most specific. The firm identifies potential advisers through two channels: the clients it meets, and the wider industry. “We know people who are doing the right things and who are really focused towards client centricity,” he said.<\/p>\n
What follows is patience. “There are individuals where we have followed up for four years, five years, to get them on board so the philosophy will match,” Stephen said.<\/p>\n
He was candid that this is not a formalised system. “I don’t have a specific model that allows a recruitment or getting them onboarded,” he said. Instead, the firm assesses how many of its own principles and values are already evident in how a given adviser services clients, and approaches from there.<\/p>\n
The timelines vary considerably. “Sometimes it happens in six months, sometimes it happens in one year,” he said. “We have still people whom we’ve been following for the last five years, and hopefully someday they will join us.”<\/p>\n
That last remark is more revealing than it sounds. A firm willing to spend five years waiting for a particular adviser has judged that the individual, and the philosophy they bring, matters more than filling a seat. For a business facing a generational transfer among its clients, that is a defensible allocation of patience, since the adviser who eventually sits across from a founder’s daughter is the product.<\/p>\n
It also sets a high operational bar. Recruitment conducted over multi-year horizons cannot be delegated to a process or outsourced to a search firm. It requires senior people to maintain relationships with individuals who may never join.<\/p>\n
Curious and Global<\/p>\n
Closing the session, Goel asked each panellist for a single line on what the next generation gets wrong about them. Stephen declined the invitation to criticise and offered an observation instead.<\/p>\n
“I would say they are slightly more curious, and they are slightly more global in their thought process,” he said.<\/p>\n
Both halves carry weight for the firms on the panel. Curiosity means a client who asks follow-up questions and checks the answers, raising the standard of preparation required before a meeting rather than after it. A global outlook means portfolios, structures and residency questions extending well beyond the domestic market most Indian wealth managers were built to serve.<\/p>\n
Taken with his opening premise, the two observations describe the challenge Stephen has set his own business. If no relationship is inherited, and the incoming generation is more inquisitive and less bounded by geography than the one before it, the firm’s competitive position rests almost entirely on the quality of the individuals it can attract and retain. On the evidence of this panel, Anand Rathi Preferred is content to be judged on exactly that, and prepared to wait years at a time to get it right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One sentence cut through an hour of discussion at the Hubbis India Wealth Management Forum 2026 in Mumbai,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":867701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[219760,219764,219772,219768,219759,219763,219771,219767,219761,219765,219773,219769,219758,219762,219770,219766,64,63,99,18608,186,184,185,1542],"class_list":["post-867700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-asia-private-banking","tag-asia-private-banking-news","tag-asia-private-banking-online-training","tag-asia-private-banking-training","tag-asia-wealth-management","tag-asia-wealth-management-news","tag-asia-wealth-management-online-training","tag-asia-wealth-management-training","tag-asian-private-banking","tag-asian-private-banking-news","tag-asian-private-banking-online-training","tag-asian-private-banking-training","tag-asian-wealth-management","tag-asian-wealth-management-news","tag-asian-wealth-management-online-training","tag-asian-wealth-management-training","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-e-learning","tag-finance","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=867700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/867701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=867700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=867700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=867700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}