Sapna Narang (Advisor from Delhi) – Narang says that if investments do well - as is expected both on the debt and equity side - the MF industry will also do incrementally better. The good investment returns will have a 'pull' factor for the MF industry. She feels that it will give a positive push to the distribution industry as better debt and equity returns will result in more opportunities to distribute products. Thus distribution should do incrementally better.
So, Narang also has expansion plans for the year. “We have moved into a new office this year, 2012. And we intend to hire more employees. We are also, evaluating a new software,” said Narang.
Vinod Jain (Advisor from Mumbai) – Jain is also looking forward for a vertical expansion and plans to add more HNI clients in this year. “For last two years we have added very few clients. Therefore in this year we are concentrating on growing our clientele,” said Jain. He is also developing an in house customer relationship management (CRM) software for strengthening customer relations.
Jain expects the market to be bullish during 2013 and the mutual fund industry to report positive growth.
But he feels that it would be quite a challenging year for the distribution business. “It will be a challenging year for the distribution business as I expect the distribution industry to settle down only by the end of 2013 after implementing the new regulatory changes,” claimed Jain.
Vishal Dhawan (Advisor from Mumbai) – Dhawan is also looking at expanding his business by adding more employees as he is confident of a positive growth in the market in this year.
“For the last seven months, the markets have shown positive growth and it should continue during this year too,” said Dhawan.
According to him, distribution business will go through some changes that would lead to a segregation between the financial advisors and distributors. IFAs need to prove their potential because clients will only come to those who can provide quality advice. “While we are keen on expansion but we are not looking at hiring people aggressively,” said Dhawan.
Kanak Jain (Advisor from Kolkata) – Jain is in a hiring mode as he feels that this year the market will continue showing positive growth.
He expects quite some changes in the mutual fund distribution business. He expects that hard working, qualified advisors would continue to do good business. And these advisors will be able to charge a fee for their advice. He also feels that the fund industry will report very positive growth and he expects the fund managers to deliver better returns due to upward movement of the market.
Hemant Rustagi (Advisor from Mumbai) – Rustagi plans to sharpen his capabilities in terms of client services, drawing financial plans and client engagement. “We also plan to strengthen our team and provide more training programme so that I have a set of high potential, qualified team members. We will invest in developing technology,” said Rustagi
