TIFIN, a firm backed by JP Morgan, SEI and a range of financial firms, is taking aim at the opportunities it sees in India's rising affluence.

TIFIN, an AI and innovation platform for the wealth sector, has rolled out an India business to further develop its direct-to-customer and business-to-business AI for wealth applications. 

The new entity is called TIFIN India. It was launched with the DSP family group, a financial services firm in the country.

Aditi Kothari Desai, vice chairperson of the DSP Mutual Fund company, will serve on the board of directors for TIFIN India Enterprise – to give the entity’s full name – with TIFIN founder and CEO Dr Vinay Nair.

TIFIN India will be organised into two main units, MyFi, an AI assistant to help individuals achieve better wealth outcomes, and TIFIN India Enterprise, which will build AI native products for financial services firms.  

The move by the firm is another example of India’s growing story as a wealth management jurisdiction. TIFIN said the penetration of wealth management in India is only 8 per cent (compared with 72 per cent in the US and 44 per cent in China). With a population of more than 1.4 billion, TIFIN expects over 500 million individuals to access wealth and asset management services in the next seven years, it said in a statement yesterday. 

As an example of Indian wealth management stories, Eton Solutions, which provides cloud-based services for family offices, earlier in July launched its enterprise reporting platform, AtlasFive, in India. It also announced that the launch client is Catamaran, the family office of Infosys’s founder, Narayana Murthy. The US-headquartered tech firm, created by US multi-family office Eton Advisors about a decade ago, also aims to set up a presence in GIFT City, Gujarat. In a separate story, Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) is starting operations at the new GIFT City financial hub in India. HSBC also plans to offer dollar-denominated products to non-residents from the hub.

TIFIN’s companies have included 55ip (sold to JP Morgan), Paralel, and Magnifi, TIFIN Wealth, TIFIN Give, TIFIN AG, TIFIN AMP, Sage, Helix, and TIFIN @Work. TIFIN has been backed by JP Morgan, Morningstar, Hamilton Lane, Franklin Templeton, SEI, Motive Partners, and Broadridge among others.