India's wealth is ready to transfer. Are your clients ready?
Entrepreneurs create wealth. But without a structured plan, that wealth rarely survives the second generation intact. The Chartered Trust and Estate Planner™ trains you to be the professional who bridges that gap — for India's most valuable clients.
Entrepreneurs are skilled at creating wealth. Preserving it across generations is a different discipline.
Much of the wealth in the world will change hands over the next two decades — from experienced family members who created it to newer generations who may not be prepared to manage or preserve it.
Estate planning is the process that seeks to manage an individual's or a family's wealth in the event of incapacity or passing away. Its core components include intergenerational wealth transfer, business succession planning, trust planning, family wealth governance and estate tax planning.
In India, this challenge is acute. Personal law is fragmented across Hindu, Muslim and other legal systems. HUF structures interact with daughters' coparcenary rights in ways that surprise even senior professionals. Nominees on folios, policies and accounts are frequently assumed to be owners — but they are not. Wills drafted without considering trust structures, FEMA obligations or business succession often fail the families they were meant to protect.
The result: family disputes, frozen assets, eroded businesses and lost relationships — even when every professional involved did their individual job correctly.
Serving HNI and UHNI families on estate planning is one of the most significant advisory opportunities in India today.
Most financial professionals serve clients in one domain. Estate planning requires someone who sees the whole picture — and almost no one in India is trained to do that.
Business succession planning
Entrepreneurs often have no succession structure for the business itself.
Partnerships dissolve on death by default under the Indian Partnership Act. Family businesses split equally when there is no buyout plan. A trained estate planner identifies these risks and structures solutions — shareholders' agreements, family settlements, business trusts — before they become crises.
Intergenerational wealth transfer
Most HNI families have no documented succession plan covering all their assets.
Wills are often incomplete, undated or drafted without regard for HUF property, jointly held assets or digital accounts. Family dynamics — multiple heirs, differing expectations, NRI children — make transfer complex. CTEP™ professionals are trained to build comprehensive plans that actually work.
Trust planning
Private trusts are under-used and poorly understood across the profession.
Discretionary trusts protect spendthrift or vulnerable heirs. MWP Act trusts shield insurance proceeds from creditors. Testamentary trusts provide for minor children after a parent's death. Family governance structures give structure to multi-generational wealth. Very few advisors know how to recommend, draft or administer these — CTEP fills that gap.
NRI and cross-border estates
India's NRI community creates unique and growing cross-border succession complexity.
Indian-resident parents with NRI children, Indian assets inherited by OCI holders, FEMA repatriation restrictions, double-taxation treaty interactions — these situations require a professional who has studied them specifically. The CTEP™ curriculum includes an entire unit on international estate planning covering India, Singapore, the UK, the US and UAE frameworks.
Family dynamics and governance
Wealth transfer is as much about families as it is about assets.
Philanthropy planning, family governance structure planning, managing competing interests of heirs and balancing the needs of a surviving spouse alongside the interests of adult children — these require skills that go beyond law or finance alone. CTEP™ builds the professional toolkit for each of these conversations.
The underserved advisory market
Demand vastly exceeds the supply of trained estate planners in India.
There is no established pipeline of estate-planning specialists in India comparable to the UK's STEP or the US's CFP track. The CTEP™ is the only dedicated, structured certification for this discipline available in the country — meaning early movers who earn it face very limited competition in a growing market.
Every wealthy family needs an estate planner. Most don't yet know it.
The professionals who serve them — advisors, lawyers, accountants, bankers — are the ones who can introduce that conversation. CTEP™ equips you to lead it.
Business owners and entrepreneurs
A lifetime of wealth-creation needs a succession plan for both the business and the personal estate. Most have neither.
Multi-generational HNI families
Families with significant property, investments, insurance and business interests that will transfer across generations — and complex family dynamics around that transfer.
NRI families with India-based assets
Indian parents with NRI children, or NRIs who hold Indian property — where inheritance, FEMA and repatriation create a legal maze that needs a specialist.
Families with vulnerable heirs
Parents of a child with a disability, a spendthrift heir, or a minor child — who need trusts and structured protection rather than a direct inheritance.
Family offices
Institutionalised family wealth management requires estate, succession and governance expertise that the CTEP™ provides in a structured, certified form.
Charitably inclined clients
Philanthropy, charitable trusts and structured giving are part of estate planning — and clients who wish to build a legacy alongside a succession plan need a CTEP™ professional.
How CTEP™ positions you to capture the opportunity
Knowing that a market exists is not enough. The CTEP™ gives you the knowledge, the credential and the confidence to have estate-planning conversations with your most valuable clients — and to charge a fee commensurate with that expertise.
You see the whole estate
CTEP™ teaches you to view ownership, law, tax, liquidity and family as one system — not in silos. That integrated view is the estate planner's primary value.
You become the lead professional
Estate planning is the discipline that coordinates the lawyer, the CA, the banker and the insurer. CTEP™ gives you the knowledge to sit at the centre of that team.
You serve HNI clients at a higher level
Estate and succession planning is retainer-based, relationship-led advisory work. It retains families across generations and commands fees that product-distribution cannot.
You carry a globally recognised credential
CTEP™ is awarded under the standards of the American Academy of Financial Management (AAFM, USA), recognised in 151+ countries — giving your practice international credibility.
You operate in a low-competition space
India has almost no certified estate-planning specialists relative to the size of the market. CTEP™ professionals are in a category of one in most cities and most client relationships.
Explore every step of the CTEP™ journey
The Chartered Trust & Estate Planner pathway is a connected set of pages — start anywhere, each links back here.
Become the trusted name in trust & estate planning
Give a course advisor 15 minutes and walk away with a clear plan, fee options and your next batch date — no pressure, no jargon.
Estate-planning opportunity — questions answered
Estate planning is the process of structuring the ownership, transfer and protection of an individual's or family's wealth in anticipation of incapacity or death. In India, where personal law, HUF structures and cross-border assets create layered complexity, a structured plan covering wills, trusts, nominations and succession law is essential to preserve wealth across generations.
Yes. India has a large and fast-growing population of high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families whose accumulated wealth is approaching an intergenerational transfer. Most of these families have no structured succession plan, and very few professionals are trained to provide one — making it one of the most under-served advisory niches in Indian finance.
Entrepreneurs and business owners, wealthy families with multiple heirs, NRI families with cross-border assets, family offices managing multi-generational wealth, and any individual with significant property, investments, insurance or business interests that need to transfer smoothly.
A CTEP™ professional helps clients identify succession risks, draft or review wills, structure private and family trusts, plan business succession, align nominations and titling with personal law, and where relevant structure cross-border estates for NRI heirs — all as part of a coherent, documented estate plan.
No. CTEP™ is designed for finance and advisory professionals as well as legal practitioners. It builds the relevant law from first principles in a practical, client-advisory way. Many of the best estate planners come from wealth management, MFD or insurance backgrounds.
CTEP™ covers six units spanning the fundamentals of estate planning, the laws affecting it, personal and intestate succession, will drafting and testamentary succession, trust planning in India, and international estate planning for NRI and cross-border situations — giving you the full toolkit to serve any estate-planning client.
Start your CTEP™ journey today
Request a call back and our counsellors will share the full syllabus, fees, batch options and the next start date — and help you choose the right path.