With Kapadia gone to Singapore, German bank turns to mutual-fund executive. Deutsche Bank has put Ajay Bagga, formerly CEO of Lotus India Asset Management, in charge of its Indian Private Wealth Management (PWM) business. He replaces Nikhil Kapadia who has been tapped to lead Deutsche Bank PWM's Asian business-development efforts from Singapore after five years of running the German bank's private-client show in India.

Deutsche Bank is custodian to Lotus India's mutual funds.

HNW population growth

"Deutsche Bank [PWM] has grown rapidly over the past five years and is broadly recognized as a leading private bank in India," says Deutsche Bank India CEO Gunit Chadha. "[It] is a highly specialized business, and Ajay's significant experience will further strengthen our offering to high-net worth clients [and] increase connectivity with the investment bank in order to better serve entrepreneurs."

Bagga, a 19-year veteran of the financial-service business, joined Lotus India as its top executive in 2005. Before that, he worked at SBI GE, an India credit-card joint venture between GE Capital and the State Bank of India, GE Money India and Citibank India.

In his new role, Bagga is responsible for building out Deutsche's PWM business in India, which provides banking, investment and planning services to high-net-worth clients and well-to-do business owners.

Mumbai-based Bagga reports to Chadha and to Venkatesh Narasiah, head of Deutsche Bank's PWM business in the Asian-Pacific region.

Last year India led the world in high-net-worth population growth, according to the 2008 World Wealth Report, which is published by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini. It added 23,000 individuals with the equivalent, at least, of $1 million in financial assets for a total of 123,000 -- a gain of 23%.

By 2012, India's wealth managers could be serving a market of 42 million households with $1 trillion in investable assets, according to Celent, a Boston-based market-research firm. In the middle of 2007, India's wealth-management marketplace was worth about $500 billion. -FWR

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