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For Credit Suisse, India comes second only to Switzerland in staff tally. finews.asia looks at how private banks have built up powerhouses on the subcontinent – without winning much of its business.

An ultra-rich Indian millennial couple reportedly spent millions on a lakeside pre-wedding blowout in St. Moritz last month. Roughly 850 guests were treated to a private concert by Coldplay, a fun-fair including a Ferris wheel, and cricket on the frozen lake of St. Moritz.

The figures are stunning: home to 263,000 rich people, the subcontinent is the fastest-growing private banking market in the world, according to CapGemini. Economic growth is north of 6 percent and the ranks of the wealthy climb more than 20 percent every year. And wealth managers get it – just not how you would expect.

Huge Teams, Modest Showing

Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs have huge onshore teams in India, and yet surprisingly modest pickings to show for it: the Swiss bank’s $2.7 billion onshore are a fraction of its nearly $800 billion overall wealth pot, according to a compilation by «Asian Private Banker». The American bank doesn’t even rank in the top-25 according to the industry publication’s most recent data.

Only a handful of foreign banks are successful in the market. Most of the world’s largest private banks including UBS eschew India: too fragmented, too cumbersome on regulation, a playing field skewed to domestic players, and in the Swiss bank’s case, conflicts with offshore banking activities elsewhere.

UBS Relinquishes

UBS quietly buried its onshore India ambitions when it returned its license in 2014. For other contenders, India is too big to ignore but too fragmented to make money from, as experts put it. The onshore market is dominated by banks like Kotak and Edelweiss.

As large a country as India is, some would argue breaking into this very exclusive club requires the right connections. Who hasn’t given up on banking India’s wealthy onshore? BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, Citigroup – and the only Swiss bank of note onshore, Julius Baer.

The Zurich-based wealth manager won licenses and headcount with meaningful local relationships in one fell swoop with the 2012 acquisition Merrill Lynch’s international private bank.

Massive Headcount

This isn’t just true of wealth management: Goldman Sachs has accepted some humbling moments in investment banking as well. The American powerhouse has bid for IPOs that earned less in fees than the printing costs involved on the project, according to people familiar with the matter – because bidding for privatization of Indian public sector undertakings is so strongly tied to relationships.

And yet Credit Suisse employs 14,000 people in India, UBS has 11,000 staff, and Goldman Sachs employs the most engineers in the country outside its New York headquarters.

Banks have poured money into sites like Goldman’s gleaming new $250 million campus in Bangalore which can house 9,000 staff. The math is the obvious reason: Indian specialists cost less than those in Switzerland, the U.K., or the U.S.