The growth number is the one everybody quotes: roughly 45 family offices in 2018, more than 300 today, around $30 billion under management, per PwC.
The number nobody quotes is how many of them have a technologist. In my experience of this market it is close to none, and that gap is the actual story.
Why the Indian version is structurally different
Most writing about family office technology is written for American and European offices that were established as offices. They started with a mandate, hired a team, and bought systems for the purpose.
The Indian family office is usually a carve-out. A promoter family with an operating business starts managing serious investable assets, and the office grows out of the company's finance function. It inherits the company's IT, its finance team, frequently its ERP, and its assumptions.
That arrangement works, genuinely, for a while. Then the family's asset base outgrows systems designed for manufacturing or trading, and the failure is gradual enough that nobody can point at the week it happened. What they can point at is the symptom: the reporting cycle is now three weeks, and the answer to what are we worth requires a phone call to one specific person.
The four problems that do not transfer
Custodian and PMS feeds are shaped for a regulator. Positions sit across bank custodians, PMS providers, AIF capital-account statements and demat accounts, each on its own schedule and format. PMS reporting in particular is built to satisfy a compliance requirement rather than to be consolidated, and private-market positions still arrive as PDFs nobody can parse. The integration work, not the platform, is the cost.
GIFT City is a second reporting reality. A family with an IFSC vehicle runs two regimes simultaneously. Producing one consolidated balance sheet across both is a data-modelling problem, and it is usually the exact point at which the spreadsheet approach becomes untenable.
Cross-border runs in both directions. Most Indian offices of any size hold assets outside India, and many have family members tax-resident elsewhere. Which entity owns which position, in which currency, on which valuation date, without hand-editing anything, is a harder question here than the equivalent in a single-jurisdiction family.
Data governance barely exists. Not as a compliance failure, as an absence. Most offices at this size have no access model at all: everyone with the shared drive link sees everything, including the next generation, including departed staff. SEBI and FEMA adjacent obligations make this sharper, but the honest driver is that a family should be able to say who saw which entity's holdings last quarter, and almost none can.
Three cities, three different conversations
Mumbai is the deepest and most institutional pool. More multi-family offices, more in-house investment staff, and engagements that look closer to a small institution than to a family — more entities, more managers, more pressure on cycle time.
Bangalore has the newest money and the most technically literate principals, frequently founders who exited and now run their own office. They rarely need convincing that technology matters. They need someone to make the platform decision and own it, rather than adding a seventh opinion.
Chennai is closely held and mostly first-generation-institutionalised: an operating business, a growing portfolio, and a finance team that inherited the technology by accident. This is where our own advisory relationships are, and I will describe them by type and mandate only — never by name.
What I would do first, and it is not buying software
Map where the data actually lives before evaluating a single platform.
Every entity. Every custodian and manager. How each one delivers data, in what format, on what schedule. Who currently touches it. What breaks if that person is on leave.
This takes about two weeks and it routinely surprises the principal, because the honest finding is usually that one person holds the entire system in their head and has never been asked to write it down.
Only after that map exists does platform selection become a real decision rather than a vendor beauty contest. I have written a longer read on which platform fits which family, and the general shape of the role is in what a family office CTO actually does.
Why this is a fractional role here specifically
The workload is lumpy in exactly the way that suits fractional engagement: intense through a carve-out or a migration, then quiet maintenance. Indian offices at this size cannot keep a senior full-time technologist busy, and the ones that hire anyway tend to hire someone junior enough to be affordable and then discover the seat needed seniority.
The pricing, the city coverage and the engagement shapes are on the family office CTO in India page. If the family is also investing directly rather than only through funds, the related discipline is technical due diligence on those deals.
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