Harsha Vardhana VM on the Future of Wealth Management, Cross-Border Investing, and Technology-Driven Advisory
In this StartupTalky WealthTech Leaders Insights Series interview, Harsha Vardhana VM, Group CEO of Atom Financial Services, discusses global investing, structured products, tax policy, AI in wealth management, and the future of client advisory.
The global wealth management industry is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 6–8% over the next several years, driven by rising high-net-worth (HNW) populations, digital advisory platforms, and increasing cross-border investments. India's wealth management market is also expanding rapidly, supported by growing financial assets, record SIP inflows, and the emergence of sophisticated investment products. As technology reshapes client expectations, the future of wealth management will increasingly combine AI-powered insights, digital convenience, and personalized human advisory.
In this edition of the StartupTalky WealthTech Leaders Insights Series, Harsha Vardhana VM, Group CEO of Atom Financial Services, shares his views on global wealth management trends, structured products, tax policy, domestic versus foreign investment flows, technology adoption, and the advantages of building an employee-owned wealth management firm.
Investment Strategies Across India, the UAE, and Singapore
StartupTalky: Atom Financial Services Group operates across India, the UAE, and Singapore. How does the investment mandate and risk appetite of an Indian HNI investor differ meaningfully across those geographies?
Harsha Vardhana VM: The differences are real, and they matter for how portfolios are actually constructed. An HNI client based in India is typically dealing with a large portion of wealth that is tied up in a family business, real estate, or both. The investable surplus is often a fraction of total net worth, and the emotional relationship with liquidity is therefore quite different.
There is still a strong gravitational pull toward physical assets, gold, and increasingly, equity. The risk appetite at the portfolio level tends to be moderate to aggressive on the equity side, but the overall financial ecosystem is still predominantly domestic.
The profile shifts meaningfully when you move to the UAE. A large share of the Indian HNI community in the Gulf is NRI and has built wealth through business in a zero-income-tax environment. The conversation there is far more explicitly about global diversification and asset protection, not just growth.
The USD is the base currency, the time horizon is multi-generational, and the comfort with offshore structures, dollar-denominated bonds and international alternatives is considerably higher. Regulatory clarity in DIFC has also made formal wealth management a more natural choice for this segment over the past few years.
Singapore sits in a different category altogether. The clients there are often founder-entrepreneurs or family offices that have already internationalised. The investment mandate is genuinely global, with meaningful allocations to private equity, hedge funds, real assets and multi-currency fixed income.
Risk appetite is sophisticated, the holding period is long, and the conversation moves quickly from products to structures. The governance layer around succession and cross-border estate planning is a central part of the advisory relationship there; in a way, it simply is not for most clients in India. Across all three geographies, the common thread is that the wealthier the client, the more they are asking for integration, not just products.
Understanding Structured Products and Their Risks
StartupTalky: Atom Privé was recognised as the largest contributor of structured products for Nuvama Wealth in FY25. For someone unfamiliar with structured products, what are they, when do they make sense, and what risks do investors typically overlook?
Harsha Vardhana VM: Structured products are best understood as pre-packaged investment strategies that combine a conventional asset, usually a bond or a fixed income instrument, with a derivative overlay to create a specific payoff profile. The output might be full principal protection with capped upside linked to an index, or it might be a higher-yield instrument that sacrifices some downside protection in exchange for income. The defining feature is that the risk-return relationship is engineered to a specific outcome rather than left to market forces alone.
They make the most sense for a particular type of client in a particular type of market environment. For an HNI who has meaningful equity exposure and wants to participate in further upside while protecting a floor on the portfolio, a capital-protected structure linked to the Nifty or a global index can genuinely fill a gap that neither pure equity nor fixed income fills on its own. In volatile or range-bound markets, certain yield-enhancement structures can also deliver income that outperforms straightforward debt at equivalent credit quality.
The product category becomes relevant when the client has a view on direction but wants to define the boundaries of the outcome.
The risks that get overlooked are almost always on the liquidity side and the complexity side. Most structured products have a fixed maturity, and premature exit is either not possible or happens at a significant discount. The secondary market for these instruments in India is thin, and investors who need liquidity during the tenure are exposed in a way they were not fully prepared for at the time of entry.
The other risk is counterparty credit, which often sits with the issuing bank or NBFC and is not always adequately stress-tested. The derivative component embedded in these products also carries implicit costs that are rarely disclosed transparently. A product that claims to deliver Nifty upside with zero downside is not magic. The cost of that engineering is somewhere in the structure, and investors who do not ask where it sits are the ones who tend to be surprised at maturity.
Tax Policy and Long-Term Portfolio Planning
StartupTalky: You have publicly flagged concerns about capital gains tax consistency ahead of Budget 2026. How does tax policy uncertainty affect long-term portfolio construction decisions for private wealth clients?
Harsha Vardhana VM: Tax policy has a structuring effect on long-term portfolios that goes well beyond the tax itself. When rates and holding period thresholds change frequently, the advisory process has to reserve space for what might be called defensive optionality, essentially building portfolios that do not become structurally inefficient if the tax treatment of any given asset class shifts between budget cycles. That creates a genuine cost for clients in the form of sub-optimal positioning that would otherwise not exist in a stable framework.
The July 2024 changes, which moved LTCG on equity to a flat 12.5% without indexation, STCG to 20%, and effectively removed the preferential treatment for debt funds bought after April 2023, were a meaningful reset. Budget 2026 chose to keep that framework intact, which is the right signal.
Consistency matters more to long-term private wealth clients than any particular rate. The debt fund tax change, specifically taxing gains from post-April 2023 purchases at slab rates rather than a preferential rate, has already altered allocation behaviour among clients in the 30% bracket.
The effective post-tax yield differential between debt funds, direct bonds and FDs has narrowed considerably for high-income investors, and that has pushed a section of HNI clients toward market-linked debentures, direct G-Sec ladders, and alternative credit structures.
The broader advisory implication is that portfolios now need to be designed with tax efficiency layered in at construction, not retrofitted. Holding period management has always mattered, but it matters more now that the marginal difference between short-term and long-term treatment on equity is 750 basis points.
For family offices managing multi-generational wealth, where realisation events are spread over decades, the tax architecture of the structure is often as important as the underlying return assumption. An environment where that architecture might change without notice makes long-term planning materially harder, and that friction has real value consequences.
The Growing Role of Domestic Investors in Indian Markets
StartupTalky: Foreign institutional investors have pulled over INR 1.92 lakh crore from Indian equities in 2026 so far, yet domestic SIP flows have absorbed most of that selling. How does that shift in ownership shape long-term private wealth strategy?
Harsha Vardhana VM: The Rs 1.92 lakh crore number gets quoted a lot, but the number alone tells only half the story. What matters more is what happened on the other side of that selling. In previous cycles, foreign outflows of this scale would have knocked the index down meaningfully and unsettled the broader market for months. That did not happen this time.
Domestic institutions stepped in with roughly Rs 1.7 lakh crore year-to-date, absorbing nearly 90% of what FIIs were offloading. SIP contributions crossed Rs 32,087 crore in March 2026, a record at the time, before easing slightly in the months after. FII ownership of Indian equities has drifted down to around 16%, close to a two-decade low, and domestic institutional ownership has now crossed it. That is not a footnote. That is a genuine structural change in who owns the Indian market.
For private wealth clients, this shift carries two practical consequences worth thinking through carefully. The first is that the old relationship between a global risk-off event and an Indian market correction has loosened.
When the marginal buyer is a domestic SIP investor with a ten-year horizon and automatic monthly contributions, foreign selling tends to create short-term noise rather than sustained damage. That gives HNI portfolios more room to hold equity through periods of external turbulence without the same anxiety that would have been justified five years ago.
The second is more subtle. As domestic institutions take a larger share of the market, the dynamics of price discovery are changing. Domestic funds tend to be more benchmark-conscious and less prone to the sectoral herding that characterised large FII flows.
That means stock selection and sector positioning will increasingly be stress-tested by a different kind of capital, patient, process-driven, and less reactive to short-term global cues. Using FII flows as a directional signal for Indian equities, which was a widely used heuristic for a long time, is becoming a less reliable guide than it once was.
Balancing Technology and Human Advisory
StartupTalky: Technology adoption among UHNW clients in wealth management has risen sharply. Where does Atom Privé draw the line between technology-enabled efficiency and the high-touch advisory that private clients still expect?
Harsha Vardhana VM: The technology versus human debate in wealth management gets more airtime than it deserves. The question was never really which one wins. It was always about which jobs belonged to which. Get that sorting wrong and the problems are fairly obvious. Either the platform becomes so feature-heavy that clients stop opening it, or the advisors are covering so many relationships at once that the depth of each one starts to thin out without anyone quite noticing until it is too late.
There is an obvious place for technology, and it is in the plumbing. A client who needs to check their portfolio at odd hours, run a quick scenario before a meeting, or track where they stand against a financial goal should not have to wait for a call back. That kind of access is a given now, not a selling point.
The Hubbis India Private Wealth survey from 2025 found that digital tools score well with HNI and UHNI clients specifically on portfolio visibility and operational tasks, not on the advisory side of things. That tells you something important about where clients actually want technology and where they do not.
The advisory side is harder to pin down, but most clients know it when they experience it. Someone working through whether to take their business public, how to pass wealth to the next generation without fracturing the family, or whether it is the right time to step into private equity for the first time, is not showing up to that conversation wanting an output from a system.
They want someone who was there during the last difficult market, who understands the unspoken dynamics around money in the family, and who has no quiet reason to point them in the wrong direction. That kind of trust is not something you build quickly, and it certainly does not live in a reporting tool. Technology does a good job with the information layer. Everything beyond that still comes down to the person sitting across the table.
How Employee Ownership Shapes Client Relationships
StartupTalky: You built Atom as an employee-owned firm. How does ownership structure affect the quality and continuity of advisory relationships with clients over time?
Harsha Vardhana VM: Ownership structure does not come up enough in conversations about what separates good wealth management firms from average ones. But it probably should, because it quietly answers a question that clients rarely think to ask: when the firm's interest and the client's interest are pointing in different directions, which one actually wins? In wealth management, that tension shows up all the time.
It shows up in product selection, in how aggressively a firm grows its client base, and in whether an advisor is nudged toward generating a transaction or toward doing nothing when doing nothing is the right answer. An employee-owned firm does not resolve those tensions through the character of individual advisors. It resolves them through the structure itself, because the people giving advice have a direct stake in what happens to the firm over the long run, and that long run is inseparable from whether clients are genuinely well served.
The practical consequences are meaningful. Advisors who are equity participants in the firm behave differently from those on a salary and sales target. They are less likely to churn a portfolio for transactional income. They are more likely to have frank conversations with clients during drawdowns rather than managing perception. They are also far more likely to stay.
In institutional wealth management, the average relationship manager tenure at a large bank is typically two to three years before they move for a better title or a larger variable. That mobility is enormously disruptive for clients, particularly UHNI clients who have spent considerable time building trust with a specific individual. An ownership stake creates a retention mechanism that compensation alone does not replicate.
The continuity point is especially important in cross-border wealth advisory, where the complexity of client structures makes relationship handover genuinely costly. A client with assets across India, the UAE and a Mauritius holding structure, with a succession plan that involves three children in different geographies, carries context that takes years to fully understand.
That context does not transfer cleanly in a handover document. Employee ownership creates the conditions under which advisors are incentivised to stay long enough to earn that depth of understanding, and that ultimately shows up in the quality of advice over time.
Varun Bhardwaj
