The Mumbai-based ASK Group, a financial and portfolio management advisory, with $1.5 billion under management, is on the road to raise as much as Rs 3,000 crore for two funds it is advising.
While Rs 1,500 crore will be for a real estate fund, an equal sum will be for a sector- agnostic private equity one. ASK, which is into wealth advisory, investment management and property investment management, is also embarking on setting up an asset management company (AMC). This is to look at launching mutual funds focused on ultra high net worth individuals (HNIs).
Asit Koticha, chairman & founder, told Business Standard they were awaiting approval from the Securities and Exchange Board of India for the AMC. “Across all our businesses, we have only targeted the ultra HNIs, with a minimum size of Rs 2 crore and upwards. Our AMC will also look at such a profile of customers,” he said.
ASK was promoted in 1983 by brothers Asit and Sameer Koticha. It intially had a joint venture with global financial powerhouse Raymond James for portfolio and wealth management services. In early 2007, this was bought out by ASK and since then, it has been expanding its range of business.
“There is enough scope to grow our flagship wealth management business and we have hardly tapped into this sector. Over the next three years, we are looking at doubling the assets under management to as much as $3 billion, given the immense potential this sector offers us,” Koticha said. He added they’d be open to strategic partnerships, depending on the value the partners would bring in.
The company has two real estate property funds under management. It is adding Rs 1,000 crore to the Rs 540-crore corpus of its second fund. “We have invested 40 per cent of the Rs 540-crore fund. We are seeing more opportunities to increase the corpus and are going for that. On the sector-agnostic fund, we have joined hands with Pravi Capital, to launch ASK Pravi Capital Advisors and are looking at a corpus of Rs 1,500 crore for that,” Koticha added.
He said ASK would be focused on the ultra HNI segment in all the businesses they undertook. After adding the AMC business, they’d be interested in looking at a non-banking financial company, involved in lending to the HNI segment.
