Barclays Wealth hires India head

Barclays Wealth, the private banking unit of Barclays Bank, has hired Satya Narayan Bansal as its first head of private banking in Mumbai.

Bansal joins from Indian bank ICICI, where he has spent the past seven years, most recently in Singapore, running ICICI’s South-east Asia private banking business.

He has long been associated with India’s equity market. Before moving to Singapore, Bansal was part of the team responsible for making icicidirect.com one of the largest online trading portals in India, says Barclays.

The Indian wealth market has been one of the fastest growing in the world, says the UK bank, with investable assets in India of $43 billion in 2005, which are forecast to triple to $130 billion by 2009.

Other Barclays Wealth senior hires in Asia-Pacific include the arrival in June of Didier von Daeniken, formerly Credit Suisse’s co-head of Asia-Pacific private banking. Von Daeniken is charged with expanding Barclays Wealth's Asian growth outside India.