How Manu Awasthy Is Rebuilding Indian Wealth Management From the Inside Out
He spent 20 years inside India's private banking system. Then he decided the whole thing needed rebuilding.
Manu Awasthy spent over two decades at the highest levels of Indian private banking, Citibank, Standard Chartered, Kotak Mahindra, Deutsche Bank, and IIFL Wealth (now 360 ONE), before walking away to build Centricity WealthTech in January 2022. The problem he set out to solve wasn’t abstract. He had watched it being built, one mis-sold product at a time, for 20 years.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Industry’s Original Sin, and the 85% Number Nobody Talks About
The story of Indian wealth management, as Manu tells it, is a story of structural conflict dressed up as service. In the decade from 2000 to 2010, foreign banks built the relationship manager model in India. High-trust, low-transparency, and enormously profitable. Then 2008 happened, and clients began discovering the gap between what they’d been promised and what they actually owned.
The damage that followed was concentrated in the 2012 to 2018 cycle, when real estate AIFs promising 17% to 20% returns proliferated. Almost two-thirds of them failed to perform anywhere close to those promises. Some didn’t return principal. Family offices were born not from aspiration but from broken trust.
But the flaw Manu spent 20 years watching accumulate goes deeper. Wealth distributors who want to scale inevitably pivot to manufacturing their own financial products. Once you manufacture the product, you can never objectively advise a client to exit an underperforming fund you created. The conflict is architectural, not accidental.
Centricity’s founding decision was to never manufacture. Manu built an open platform working with 80 to 85 alternate asset managers, eight to ten product options in every investment category, no proprietary product to protect.
That decision led directly to the number that defines his entire thesis.
Nearly 80 to 85% of PMSs and AIFs across genres actually underperform the index, over 15 years of data. Only the top 10 to 15% beat it. That’s the hard reality. One has to be very cautious.
The industry sells alpha, the promise of beating the market through superior fund manager skill. Manu’s platform has processed lakh-crore worth of transaction data, and the data contradicts that premise, consistently. His practical conclusion: a wealth manager’s job is not to find the next star fund. It is to build a portfolio that stays above the median and keep the client from panic-selling during a 30% correction.
Lazy investors actually make money. Every time you do a transaction, buy and sell and trade, how much money do you actually make? You don’t.
Two Platforms, One Bet
Centricity runs two platforms on 80% shared infrastructure.
One Digital is the B2B2C engine, built for India’s 17,000+ independent financial advisors and mutual fund distributors. These are micro-entrepreneurs with strong local client relationships in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, but historically limited to mutual fund distribution. Manu gives them institutional-grade access to PMS, AIFs, unlisted equities, bonds, and pre-IPO investments, along with CRM tools, portfolio reporting, and ongoing training. Training, he says, accounts for 40% of the platform’s proposition.
Full plug-and-play. Like a co-working space. You take your laptop, go and sit, everything is available.
Invictus is the B2C engine, targeting “First Families,” portfolios of Rs 100 Crore or more. Each private banker manages a maximum of 20 families, a hard cap, not a soft guideline. The reasoning is practical: if markets are down 2% and you have 40 clients to call before the session closes, you cannot do it well. Manu’s private banking team, 30 senior bankers hired in the second half of 2025, operates at that boutique ratio across Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.
The metrics behind the business are worth pausing on. Centricity reached operational break-even in February 2024, just 11 months after commencing formal operations in April 2023. AUM has moved from approximately Rs 4,500 Crore in FY24 to approximately Rs 10,000 Crore ($1.2 billion) in FY25, with a target of Rs 18,000 to 20,000 Crore in FY26. Revenue went from Rs 20 Crore in FY24 to a projected Rs 60 to 100 Crore in FY25, targeting Rs 175 to 200 Crore in FY26. The monthly SIP and STP recurring book has crossed Rs 50 Crore per month, and 60% of total AUM is classified as Annual Recurring Revenue, the slow compounding kind that survives market downturns.
In September 2024, Lightspeed India Partners led a $20 million Seed round at a $125 million valuation, a sixfold jump from Centricity’s $20 million pre-seed valuation of 2022. Co-investors included the MS Dhoni Family Office, Burman Family Office, Paramark VC, NB Ventures, and MMG Group. Manu’s three-year targets: 50,000 to 60,000 distributors on One Digital, up from 17,000+ today, and 1,200 to 1,500 First Families on Invictus, up from 135 to 150 currently.
The Philosophy That Holds It Together
What distinguishes Manu from most founders building in financial services is where he places the emphasis. Not on growth, not on scale, but on what he can and cannot control.
Markets are not controllable. Geopolitical is not controllable. Asset allocation and risk, that I can control. If I’m not doing my basic core job of what is in my control, believe me, I’m just not doing the job.
This applies to hiring. Manu screens out high-revenue bankers with a transactional mindset and hires for longevity and client engagement. His CTO, Kamal Kishore, comes from Tata Digital’s AI engineering practice, brought in specifically to embed machine learning into portfolio risk visualization. His compliance head is expected to be “drop dead serious.” His finance head is expected to push back on every expense.
The bet Manu is placing is long-dated: that an industry built on opacity, product pushing, and one-time commissions will lose share over time to one built on ARR, transparency, and compounding client relationships. It does not pay off in a quarter. It pays off the way good portfolios do.
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