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At the recent Cafemutual Confluence 2024, Dharwad MFD JB Sudarshan won the prestigious Cafemutual Big League SIP Champion Award for opening the highest number of SIP accounts during FY 2023-24 from south India.
South includes Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Kerala.
Interestingly, Sudarshan won this award for the second consecutive time. On this achievement, Sudarshan said that he was motivated by his first big league award by Cafemutual last year that made him work hard to win it for the second time. He also aims to win this prestigious award next year as well.
Powered by CAMS, the award aims to recognize the hard work of MFDs who have achieved business milestones. It identified 24 MF champions across five broad categories – SIP, equity inflows, new folios, fintech player and overall business. The award was based purely on quantitative performance during the FY 2023-24.
Sudarshan became a mutual fund distributor post his retirement in 2020. He came to know about mutual funds when a bank manager recommended him to put his retirement corpus in mutual funds instead of doing FD.
After seeing good performance of his investments, Sudarshan recommended mutual funds to his friends and family members. He also realized that many people are not aware about the benefits of mutual funds and hence, he became a distributor.
Creating knowledge sessions
Sudarshan believes in conducting knowledge sessions on SIPs for small groups. Every day, he organises 3-4 meetings with small groups like farmers, teachers, gram panchayat employees and so on.
He also takes one-on-one meetings with attendees post his knowledge sessions to persuade them to invest in mutual funds through SIPs.
Sudarshan starts his day at 7 am and ends it at 11 pm daily. He travels at least 200 km daily to meet clients and prospects.
Replace SIP with EMI
Sudarshan feels that many people take out loans to fund expenses like children's weddings, education or buying a car or land and end up paying huge amounts to banks or financial institutions through EMIs.
Sudarshan explains the concept of SIP through EMI. He tells them how SIP (reverse EMI) of a small amount can help them save for important life goals without taking loans from banks.
SIP for retirement
The MFD also encourages people to start one SIP for their post retirement life. He makes all his clients aware about the rising cost of healthcare and inflation in India and why it is necessary for them to create a regular income post retirement.
He also tells his clients to utilize some of their retirement corpus for starting a small business post retirement. He believes that this will help his retired clients to keep themselves occupied and generate some income.
Small SIPs works
Sudharshan focuses on SIP of up to Rs.3000 per month. Since the majority of his clients are from rural areas, he encourages them to start with small amounts and eventually increase their SIP contribution by Rs.500 every year.
An SIP of Rs.1000 can fetch Rs.15 lakh in 20 years. But by simply topping it up by 500, the investment corpus can become Rs.50 lakh in 20 years, feels Sudarshan.
Thanks to all these activities, his monthly SIP book now stands at Rs.98 lakh with 6000 active SIPs for over 4000 clients.
