The rise of such firms highlights how HNW and ultra-HNW individuals, often with multiple bank relationships and cross-border business and private interests, are drawn to firms that can join the strands together into a coherent picture. We talk to Klay's group chairman about its growth, approach and ambitions.

Founded in Dubai, Klay – a financial services firm looking after private clients and businesses – continues to expand, with its sights set on getting established in Switzerland, adding to Dubai, India, the UK, Singapore, Australia, Mauritius, and the Cayman Islands.

Established in 2013, employee-owned Klay has made several senior hires in recent months, such as Ahmad Chaudry in the newly-formed role as its first global head of structured products and derivatives, along with figures such as Nikita Jain from JP Morgan as deputy CEO for Klay Group in India. In May, Klay appointed former Deutsche Bank senior figure Cheryl Wong as chief operating officer in its Klay Singapore business.

Kalpesh Khakhria (main picture), group chairman of Klay, argues that rising wealth and families facing greater complexity present significant opportunities.

WealthBriefing spoke to Khakhria during a meeting late in 2025 at the firm’s office in the Dubai International Financial Centre. The busy traffic and buzz of a city hosting masses of conferences, sporting and other events seemed appropriate to the conversation.

Klay started with a very simple but powerful question that every client quietly asks themselves, Khakhria said: "Am I being advised, or am I being sold?"

“Traditional wealth models, especially in financial institutions, have been built around products, transactions and quarterly revenue targets. Yet ultra-high net worth families and business owners need something very different: joined-up advice that cuts across their personal wealth, operating companies, financing needs and long-term family objectives. We set Klay up to be an advisory-first, open-architecture platform that gives families institutional-grade investment expertise, structuring and corporate finance support without forcing them to set up a family office in-house.”

Expanding horizons
WealthBriefing asked Khakhria about where the firm might next choose to set up a presence on the ground.

“The next clear step for us is Switzerland, which we see as a natural hub alongside Dubai, Singapore and London. We are in active preparation for getting the relevant licence,” he said. “Beyond that, we are open-minded, but client led. We will not enter jurisdictions purely for a flag on the map. Any new office must add genuine value to our existing clients and be staffed with people who share our advisory philosophy.”

Having a presence in the Alpine state will make sense. For all that other jurisdictions have grown rapidly – the UAE being a prime example – Switzerland is still the world’s largest cross-border wealth management hub as at the time of writing; in 2024, it had $2.7 trillion of cross-border wealth, a touch ahead of Hong Kong (source: Boston Consulting Group). International financial centres such as Switzerland, the UAE, and Singapore are continuing to thrive.

The rise of firms such as Klay highlights how HNW and ultra-HNW individuals, often with multiple bank relationships and cross-border business and private interests, are drawn to firms that can join the strands together into a coherent picture. Other players that fit into this model include Monaco-headquartered Azura Capital, for example.

Imposing order on complexity
A large part of the Klay business model, Khakhria said, is that it brings “institutional rigour,” spanning research, governance and risk management to families and single-family offices that typically have lean teams. It uses its proprietary technology to understand families’ web of relationships with a variety of banks, and their portfolios that can sit in different countries.

“Klay exists to solve the gap between what UHNW families actually need and what the traditional product-driven system is set up to deliver,” Khakhria said.

UHNW individuals often get very fragmented advice. What they need is access to the best institutions for custody as well as product offerings from across the whole financial industry, and advice that joins everything together,” he continued. “Many of the single-family offices we work with have excellent principals but they can’t do everything. They need good, talented teams across disciplines. We give them access to our own 20-strong in-house investment advisory team and a platform that aggregates research from around 8,000 analysts globally, so we can apply institutional-style portfolio construction and risk management to those families.”

“At the same time, a lot of our clients are still building or expanding their operating businesses and may be borrowing from a handful of banks on SME-style terms. Our corporate advisory team, drawn from large banks, helps them rethink capital structure, prepare information memoranda and tap a far broader universe of more than 200 financial institutions or credit funds,” he said.

Klay doesn’t have a single investment advisor or relationship manager who engages with clients.

“We really aim to bring the whole of Klay and the right solutions to our clients. When we meet a new client, we begin with a discovery session rather than a pitch. Using our technology platform, we consolidate their existing arrangements across banks, custodians and jurisdictions, and then show them visually what their true exposures look like, where risks sit and where overlaps occur,” Khakhria said.

“We also have an advisory led model wherein we limit the number of clients that we will work with to 20 clients per advisor and no more than 2,000 families in each country in which we operate,” he said.

Fees and alignment
WB asked Khakhria how the business incentivises the Klay team to be aligned with clients, and how scalable is this kind of firm?

“Klay is employee-owned,” Khakhria responded. “We have a strong belief in employee ownership and long-term incentive structures that enable key people to participate in the value they help create. All the investment professionals at Klay are incentivised based on the performance and quality of their investment ideas not on revenue generation.”

“This is a scalable model because we are disciplined about growth. We prefer to hire fewer people, make sure they share the same values and philosophy, and then broaden ownership over time as they prove themselves,” he said.

Klay mainly levies an asset-based advisory fee. Clients pay a fee linked to assets under advice, usually billed quarterly. It does not charge performance fees on advisory mandates, nor does it charge entry or exit fees.

The firm mostly segments clients based on client needs and complexity, rather than purely on how much investment they have. It operates across four pillars: wealth management (working with individuals with roughly $5 to 25 million to invest, such as C-suite figures and entrepreneurs who may not need a full family office); multi-family office service (families and single-family offices typically in the $25 million to $2 billion range); corporate advisory (business owners regarding their financing, capital structure and strategic transactions), and asset management (working with families and institutions to provide private-label funds from $500 million to $5 billion, or to provide access to specialised strategies and structured solutions).

Khakhria said business growth is balanced with retaining a “boutique” flavour.

“We are not aiming to be everything to everyone. In each country, we work towards a rough long-term cap of around 2,000 families to ensure we maintain a genuinely boutique advisory relationship-driven model,” he added.