Manu Awasthy and the business of taking your time

Manu Awasthy has a useful way of complicating the business of wealth. Ask what a client needs, and the answer soon involves something money cannot manufacture: time. A successful entrepreneur may understand a business exceptionally well and still have little appetite for spending the afternoon comparing investment products. Awasthy has built a company around that very ordinary predicament. The fortune can be substantial. The available Tuesday remains stubbornly small.

After more than two decades in private banking, he founded Centricity in 2022. The ambition was to give financial professionals better tools and wealthy clients a more coherent experience. Years spent inside the relationship business supplied the problem. Technology offered a way to work on it without requiring every adviser to build an institution from scratch.

The apprenticeship before the app

His professional background includes Citibank, Standard Chartered and IIFL Wealth, now 360 ONE. These were places to learn what happens after someone has earned the money: the decisions, explanations and continuing work that follow a substantial portfolio. By the time he became a founder, he was bringing an existing trade into a new organisational form.

Centricity’s founding group included Aditya Shankar, Gaurav Tiwari, Manish Sharma and Pushpendra Singh. Private banking experience ran through the team. Their starting concern was familiar to practitioners: complicated portfolios meeting fragmented systems. Building the company meant turning accumulated frustrations into products that other professionals could use.

The proposition was public early. In June 2022, Awasthy was already explaining Centricity to financial distributors in a webinar about serving wealthy clients. He believed affluent Indians were poorly served by the digital tools available for managing their money. The discussion extended beyond choosing funds to understanding entrepreneurs, executives and family-business owners as different kinds of clients.

That distinction mattered. A software menu can make products appear interchangeable. A family’s requirements rarely are. Awasthy’s entry into entrepreneurship began with the view that a useful platform had to accommodate both the transaction and the person asking for it.

The client already knows someone

The independent adviser sits at the centre of Awasthy’s original business idea. That professional may already have earned the client’s confidence. Access to more investment products, reliable reporting and the machinery of execution can be harder to assemble. Centricity’s early pitch included helping experienced employees establish their own wealth management practices.

It is a practical way to think about entrepreneurship. Leaving an employer does not magically produce a research department, operating systems or a product team. A platform can supply some of those functions while the professional concentrates on the relationships that made independence possible.

OneDigital, the company’s intermediary platform, developed around that need. Its offer combines investment access with technology and support. Training belongs alongside the software because familiarity with one product category does not automatically equip someone to explain another. A broader catalogue is useful only when the person presenting it understands the contents.

The current partner programme makes the work unusually visible: research, product specialists, service support and investment counselling sit behind the local professional. Awasthy’s approach gives the adviser access to people as well as a screen. There is a certain reassuring lack of glamour in this. Someone still has to resolve the query.

A smaller city is a place, not a segment

Awasthy’s geography follows the relationships. He has repeatedly emphasised opportunities in India’s smaller cities, where business owners and affluent families create demand for advice beyond the traditional metropolitan centres. In his telling, entrepreneurship and better employment are spreading wealth across a wider part of the country.

He also describes visiting smaller cities and finding owners who have not fully recognised the value of their own businesses. It is a revealing observation from someone whose career has involved talking to people about what they own. The business can be familiar to its founder and still be difficult to see as part of a larger family balance sheet.

Centricity has used physical offices to support that expansion. The Hyderabad opening in June 2024 put Awasthy at another local point of contact. By 2025, the company was explaining how small branch teams could support partners without requiring the cost of transplanting an entire metropolitan operation.

A local presence gives the digital proposition a physical address. It also creates somewhere for questions, training and introductions to happen. The software may travel instantly. Confidence takes its own transport.

Twenty families, and a finite working day

Invictus, Centricity’s private wealth business, brings the attention question into sharper focus. In August 2025, Awasthy described limiting each banker to 20 families. He contrasted that with much larger books of relationships elsewhere in the industry. Whatever the technology can organise, the banker still has a finite day.

The limit gives a number to an otherwise rather elastic promise: personal service. A family may need an explanation when markets move or a conversation about a changing requirement. A manageable client book makes room for those calls. The ratio is a staffing choice with consequences for the economics of the business.

Awasthy makes a related argument about the client’s own working life. He respects the expertise that created the surplus in the first place. An entrepreneur or professional may have more valuable uses for an hour than taking on another specialist occupation. Delegation, in that view, begins with recognising what the client already does well.

“Somebody who has money does not have time.”

Manu Awasthy, on the client’s working day

His public explanations often return to suitability and expectations. He recalls warning investors who treated 30% returns as an easy assumption. That memory helps explain the role he gives the adviser: bring a conversation back to reasonable expectations before enthusiasm writes the plan. The unexciting sentence may be the useful one.

Put the awkward part in writing

For Awasthy, the relationship also needs an explicit commercial arrangement. He argues that the client should understand what the wealth manager will earn, discuss it openly and have the agreement documented. Compensation should be something the parties can examine together over time.

The point gives his discussion of trust an administrative backbone. Clear terms allow a client to ask what service and performance the arrangement is producing. They also allow an adviser to explain the value of the work. An uncomfortable conversation at the beginning can save a great deal of interpretive work later.

His criticism of product incentives extends to firms distributing investments they manufacture themselves. In explaining Centricity’s design, he has emphasised access to outside managers rather than building a proprietary investment product to defend. This is his stated approach to a conflict he knows from the industry.

He also makes a case for patience. “Lazy investors actually make money,” he says. The deliberate provocation fits a wider concern about unnecessary transactions and reactive decisions. He wants the professional’s effort spent on judgment, allocation and keeping the relationship useful through changing conditions. Activity can fill a diary very efficiently. Its usefulness requires a separate conversation.

The capital arrives. The questions get bigger.

The financing milestones give the founding decision a visible timeline. Centricity announced $4 million in pre-seed funding in September 2022. Two years later came a $20 million seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners. The investors included family offices, bringing the company into contact with the kind of capital its business was designed to serve.

In August 2026, Centricity announced a ₹280 crore Series A round led by SMBC Asia Rising Fund. Awasthy described ₹230 crore of equity and ₹50 crore of venture debt, with the company valued at about ₹1,800 crore. These are company financing figures; they describe the resources available for the next stage of building.

The stated uses included strengthening technology, extending distribution and expanding private wealth and global private client services. The international direction had been in Awasthy’s plans earlier: by September 2024, he was discussing a platform for Indians overseas who needed help handling investments and related requirements in India.

The global business now describes families with assets, advisers and obligations across countries. Its goal is a consolidated view spanning those arrangements, with support for investment decisions and succession. The geography changes, but the organisational problem is recognisable: put scattered information somewhere a family and its advisers can actually use it.

Time to think, time to ride

One colleague offers a small window into how Awasthy wants the company to work. Kartik Kini wrote that Awasthy often describes its approach as spending 75% of the time planning and 25% executing. Kini said it had changed his own habits, giving thinking more space before action.

Those percentages are a colleague’s account of a working philosophy. They are also an interesting detail beside the funding announcements and expansion plans. As the possible moves multiply, deciding which move deserves attention becomes part of the job.

Awasthy’s company biography adds two interests outside finance: biking and travel. They give the public portrait a little breathing room beyond portfolios and platforms. The banker who became a founder has other reasons to consult a map.

His professional story keeps returning to the same finite resource. The client has a business to run. The adviser has families to call. The founder has decisions to make before the next expansion. Centricity’s proposition is to organise more of the surrounding work so that those hours can be spent with greater care. After a long career dealing with wealth, Awasthy has given time a substantial role in the business.