Even after 10 months of SEBI directing fund houses through AMFI to provide direct plan feeds to registered investment advisers (RIAs), they are still facing difficulties in getting direct feeds.
Currently, RIAs have to approach respective fund houses with consent letter (folio-wise) to get access to direct feeds. Alternatively, a few RIAs ask their client to share the transaction confirmation mail which they get from R&T agents, which is known as mailback service. The former is time consuming and tedious while the latter is password protected and at times clients are not comfortable sharing such confidential data.
A Mumbai based RIA, Kavitha Menon who is facing such difficulties said that she cannot scale up her business if she has to do continuous follow-up with clients on their transaction details. “I have to spend most of my time in dealing with such petty issues. Even though the number of RIAs today is small, AMCS should show more sensitivity to our concerns.”
Another RIA, Prakash Praharaj claims that the direct feed report which he has received from one of the R&T agents shows that the client has no holdings in a particular scheme whereas the platform through which the transaction has been executed is reflecting it.
Suresh Sadagopan of Ladder7 Wealth Advisories said, “Almost 9 months have passed and there is not much progress on sharing of direct plan feeds to RIAs. The only way we can get direct plan feeds is by getting it from some AMCs who share that data or get info from clients themselves which R&Ts are willing to send. Folio-wise consent letter from clients is onerous. Also, this should not be insisted upon, just like in case of ARN holders. Hence, we as a team of RIAs, have requested AMFI, MFs and R&T to help us with direct plan feeds by tagging RIA code. Most AMCs have not put the RIA code on their forms & have not facilitated this capture on their websites.”
Just as IFAs receive mail from R&T agents as and when their clients execute any transaction, tagging ARN in direct plans would allow RIAs to get access to client’s transaction details in direct plans. However, AMCs are yet to start capturing RIA registration number in their transaction forms.
A senior fund official admitted that RIAs may not be getting feeds from R&T agents as AMCs are not capturing RIA code in transaction forms. There is currently no mechanism to provide them (RIAs) feeds through mailback services, he added.
According to Suresh, R&Ts have agreed to receive the data feeds from MF Utility in some pre-agreed format and this may get operational in a fortnight. This means that after that point, if one has registered with R&Ts, the transactions will have RIA codes and will hence be seen in the data feeds from their end. RIAs need to register with R&Ts for mailback services.
However, RIAs like Kavitha, Prakash and Suresh are hoping that fund houses introduce a separate box where direct plan investors can key in registration number of their advisers so that they can get access to such information on a real-time basis.
Mailback services help IFAs capture details of transactions at real-time basis and maintain a robust CRM system.
Update from Karvy Computershare
In the absence of RIA code available in the forms, we have enabled a registration based and investor consent based data feed sharing with the RIAs, through our portal. The process is as simple as given below for receiving the transaction feeds as mail back reports:
1. RIA to get registered with KCPL by submitting the RIA registration form – forms available on https://www.karvymfs.com/karvy/RIA/RIA_Login.aspx
2. KCPL will share the login credentials with the RIA as a registration process
3. Post that, in order to get the investor data, RIAs are required to provide the investor consent letter with folio details
4. Based on the investor consent letter, we will tag the folio with the RIA code & RIA can get transaction feeds as mail back services.
