See you, CIO: Why India’s family offices are struggling to hire and retain investment chiefs

A prominent businessperson made a frantic phone call to Gaurav Shah. The chief investment officer (CIO), whom his family business hired just 11 months ago, had quit—and he needed a replacement. “I have to save the mess,” the promoter told Shah, who is a managing partner of Arete Ventures, which has an executive search division.

When Shah and the promoter met in Mumbai, they agreed the problem was not the CIO who said ciao in a hurry, but the chaotic situation he was thrown into. He was hired even before there was an operating structure or a supporting team in place. An investment head, Shah pointed out, should be hired with a clearly defined mandate.

Says Shah: “Many professionals come with deep experience in private equity, venture capital, or institutional investing. But a family office may ask them to do all of it together, build the platform from ground up, define the investment thesis and create portfolio and sourcing discipline. While hiring a CIO, the family must define the mandate, not merely the title and compensation.”

A CIO is integral to a family office, as they steer its entire investment programme, but in India these two entities are still learning to tango. And this awkward dance—a professional in a personal space, an outsider on the inside, dealing with familial relations and wealth—is becoming more evident as the family office ecosystem grows by leaps and bounds.

India has more than 300 family offices managing upward of $30 billion in assets, according to The Indian Family Offices Report 2026 by The Economic Times and 1Lattice. However, the industry estimates that the number could be much higher—more than 1,000—since most of them operate with no obligation to register or disclose.

THE CHANGING OFFICE

The family office itself is undergoing a shift. Before 2020, most Indian family offices weren’t really investment operations; they were treasury desks built to protect generational wealth. Beating the Nifty by a percentage point or two was the ambition.

Two things broke that pattern—money and succession. As FII and FDI inflows rose, families that had been sitting on real estate, gold and blue-chip stocks began to put in a slice in private equity, venture funds and pre-IPO rounds. As those bets worked out, the exposure grew, pushed by a younger generation eager to diversify.

A third less visible force is regulatory pressure. “With a lot of regulatory action, families want to ensure that everything is squeaky clean,” says a senior executive at a family office who did not wish to be named.

However, as family offices try to evolve from promoter-run treasury desks to professional investment institutions, they are struggling to find and retain CIOs whose title holds an authority promoters are often not willing to bestow.

That tension shows up, first, in who gets to say yes.

“In most family offices, the final decision on any investment is made by the family. A CIO is only expected to give their analysis to the family,” says Aroon Kumar Aggarwal, managing partner for Asia, Bradford Consultants. “Senior professionals who need independent decision-making powers are not willing to join family offices except for the large ones.”

The demand for these roles, recruiters say, is far ahead of supply. Munish Randev, founder of Cervin Family Office, a multi-family office and advisory firm for family offices, says he gets a call from headhunters every other day.

While the demand is for professionals with a cross-asset-class breadth, the trouble is in finding ones who can survive the intensely personal culture of a promoter-led office.

“Culturally, family offices at times don’t understand investment professionals,” says Randev. “Sometimes they say they want to build a professional family office but we have been told that they would call up at 11 pm as they had just come back from a holiday in Europe and wanted some information.”

He points to what he calls the 90-10 rule: most families keep 90% of the money in bonds and safe instruments but spend most of the time talking about the riskier 10%. “The professional’s grouse is that after the corpus is fully invested, the fund goes into maintenance mode and is not exciting enough,” he says.

One executive lived the ambiguity associated with family offices. A CIO, who joined a Mumbai family office after months of getting to know the promoter, says he knew within a month he had made a mistake. He had built a relationship with the person he thought was calling the shots—only to discover, after joining, that someone else was.

“I’ve seen amazing family offices where they treat you with equality, and there are some places where people look down upon you.”

Devashish Khanna, CIO of private investments at Capri Global Family Office, says it comes down to the promoter’s mindset. “Every family is different. I know a lot of families that have a billion dollars in cash but invest only in bonds and fixed income.”

He traces the current wave to two groups reshaping the ecosystem—newly rich founders setting up family offices and next-generation heirs stepping into family businesses their parents built.

‘ARE YOU A VEGETARIAN?’

Some of the friction or discomfort is “cultural” in a literal sense.

Randev recalls an Ahmedabad-based family business promoter who wanted a Gujarati-speaking candidate. In another case, the demand was for a vegetarian executive as the role involved working closely with several generations of a vegan family.

“These requirements may sound unusual but they persist,” says Randev. “Getting the ‘right’ person has become a serious issue for many families. Finding someone with the right investment capabilities and relevant fund management experience and cultural fit is very difficult.”

Shah says some families are reassessing overly restrictive filters as they confront a limited pool of candidates and are worn down by churn. “The discussion is shifting from whether a candidate shares every personal preference of a family to whether the executive can respect the family’s values and workplace norms.”

The vetting sometimes goes beyond the candidate. Aggarwal recalls setting up a search for a real-estate family office — a sector where, he says, “there are generally skeletons in the closet” that surface the moment a serious candidate starts doing their own research.

Rather than let the search stall, his firm worked with the client to remove two or three family members from early conversations and pitch materials, so that candidates could get excited about the opportunity before running into parts of family history that would make them uneasy. The family agreed to the change without much resistance—a sign, he says, of how aware some promoters already are of their reputational baggage.

PAY PROBLEM

Beyond the culture-fit conversation is a bigger problem: pay structure.

In private equity and venture capital, partner-level executives are compensated with “carry” or carried interest—a share of profits—on top of salary and bonus. In family offices, it barely exists.

“About 90% of family offices in India don’t understand the concept of carry. Even if they do, they would love to deny that to the CIO,” says Khanna.

“If you are doing nothing—just fixed income for ₹10,000 crore—nobody will pay you more, and that’s absolutely fine. But if you are doing large private equity, public markets, and looking at a 20% CAGR, you have to be compensated. Everybody is hoping that they change—let’s see.”

Part of the problem is structural: unlike an alternative investment fund (AIF), a family office doesn’t answer to an external regulator. Even a written carry arrangement, says Khanna, relies largely on the family’s willingness to honour it, with few formal mechanisms for enforcement.

Many family offices also still run under the shadow of the operating business’s HR policies, treating an analyst, who needs to be out of office 15 days a month sourcing deals, the same way they would treat a shop-floor manager.

A senior family-office executive who did not want to be identified frames the standoff as a trust problem: families aren’t willing to hand over full investing authority, but they have also learned not to micromanage everything.

“What they are looking for right now is somebody who can set up a process where the decision-making is clearly laid out,” says the executive. “That’s why relationships, once formed, are pretty long-term but, in the first year or so, there could be a lot of attrition because people are still trying to figure each other out.”

Not every hire ends in a stalemate. Ankit Chona set up his family office in 2018, after selling his ice cream business, Havmor, to South Korea’s Lotte Confectionery for ₹1,020 crore.

Chona hired someone with a wealth-management background to vet proposals and, over seven years, gave her room to grow into the job. Today, Nirali Solani heads his family office, oversees investor relations across his group businesses, including Hocco, and works closely with the business leadership and finance teams.

Chona says his method for resolving disagreements is simple: “Either convince or be convinced.” He adds, “I would have the final say but a lot of confidence is built over time that I usually don’t have a strong point of view that is different from the team’s.”

OFFICE AS CLASSROOM

Several large family offices are now treating the CIO’s desk as a classroom—where young heirs are asked to shadow the professional, sit with them on workdays and eventually make the calls themselves. The executive is expected to mentor rather than dictate.

A recruiter recalls a mandate a client gave: the family didn’t want someone who had “been there, done that”. They wanted a CIO who would do the research, offer views and let the next generation make the calls.

Meanwhile, at some of the largest family offices, the opposite mandate is just as common—hand over a defined pool of capital and largely leave the professional to run it alone.

It is a changing role and executives are learning it on the job. What started as a treasury function has expanded to managing investments and overseeing an office handling philanthropy, governance and even succession.

While there are many crinkles to smooth out, the furthest end of that arc is a shift to something closer to a steward of the family’s brand and legacy—a model that family offices in the West have already moved toward, and that some of the more sophisticated Indian offices are now reaching for.