Dropping Some Knowledge at Aikya Connect

I was at the Taj last month for the 5th Annual Aikya Connect Family Office Forum. 85+ single family offices in the room. The theme: Investing in a World of Constant Change.

I had the pre-lunch slot (objectively the worst, everyone is focused on food), so I opened with the famous xkcd cartoon. You know the one. A giant, teetering tower of modern digital infrastructure, all balanced on one tiny, random piece at the bottom…in this case geopolitics.

I retitled it for family offices. The tower? Generational plans. IPS, returns, tax, risk, security, legacy, longevity, governance, succession. All stacked precariously on top of each other. The tiny piece at the bottom holding it all up? I labelled it The Strait of Hormuz. Because that’s how it goes. You spend years building the perfect plan, and then geopolitics decides to have an opinion.

The point wasn’t to scare anyone. It was that family offices today are operating in conditions that didn’t exist even ten years ago.

Think about it. The previous generation of Indian wealth was tracked across what I call EFGHI: Equities, Fixed deposits, Gold, Housing, Insurance. Five buckets. You could keep most of it in your head, or worst case, in a notebook your CA had a copy of.

Now? AIFs, SIFs, PMS, REITs, InVITs, SGBs, G-Secs, ULIPs, crypto, startups, private equity, traded bonds, derivatives, ETFs, US stocks. Spread across multiple entities. Multiple managers. Multiple advisors. Multiple generations. Often multiple geographies.

So how does a modern family office actually operate in all this mess? My pitch was a simple framework. Three As.

Aggregation. You can’t make decisions on data you can’t see. Pulling everything into one place sounds boring, but it’s the foundational layer everything else sits on.

Access anywhere, anytime. A consolidated view that lives only on the patriarch’s laptop in his Walkeshwar flat is not a modern family office. The principal needs it, the spouse needs it, the next-gen needs it, the CIO needs it. From anywhere.

Analysis. Once the data is clean and accessible, you can finally ask the questions that actually matter. XIRR vs benchmark. Concentration risk. Cash flow visibility for the next 18 months. Holding period on that PMS slice. The good stuff.

I closed with a teaser on where this is heading next, which we’re calling Enhanced Analytics. Conversational AI sitting on top of clean family office data. More on that soon.

If any of this hits home, ping me at [email protected].