In a chat with Cafemutual George Heber Joseph, CEO and CIO ITI MF shares the fund house’s plans and key focus areas.
Tell us about ITI Group and the vision for ITI MF.
What many of you may not remember is that ITI (The Investment Trust of India) was the founding promoter of Kothari Pioneer Mutual Fund, India’s first private sector mutual fund. Today, the company is a financial conglomerate having a strong presence in multiple businesses such as lending, equity research, commodities trading, portfolio management services and distribution of mutual funds. Mutual fund business is one of the recent pieces in the financial services bouquet of the group.
The group’s promoters have a very long-term vision for the mutual fund business. Like their other businesses, they have a 20+ year view in which they want the fund house to become a market leader.
To achieve this objective we are focussing on four key areas:
- Hiring the best talent
- Putting in place robust processes
- Defining a strong investment philosophy
- Having an investor centric approach and selling the right products at the right time
As a new CEO of the youngest fund house, what are your key priorities?
We are first focussing on hiring experienced people with a good track-record in mutual fund and wealth management space.
Our second priority is developing a strong investment philosophy, as we want to generate superior risk adjusted performance for our investors. To make our investment philosophy easily identifiable for our investors we have created an acronym ‘SQL’.
In case of equities, it stands for:
S- Margin of safety, which we will achieve by investing in companies available at attractive valuations
Q- Quality that is investing in top quality businesses
L- Low leverage, we plan to look at companies, which do not have a lot of debt on their books.
In debt, it stands for: S – Safety, Q – Quality and L – Liquidity.
Our third priority is setting infrastructure, processes with a long-term view and establishing our physical presence in top 30 cities.
Share with us the philosophy of your fund house. How it is different from your peers?
As a fund house, we want to be known for our ‘investor first’ focus. To this effect, we aim to promote the products most suitable for the investors at a given point in time. For. e.g. in 2008 crisis many investors were saddled with infrastructure funds, we want to avoid that and always focus on promoting funds , which will be most lucrative for our investors. In the same vein, we also plan to be careful about risks and focus on superior risk-adjusted performance instead of just superior performance.
Tell us about your team
Currently, Milan Mody, has been hired in our fixed income team, he has over 16 years of experience in debt trading and fund management. Pradeep Gokhale has joined our equity team as Senior Fund Manager and Head of Research. He has over 25 years of experience in equity space. Vikas Rathi from Reliance MF has joined us as National Sales Head and Hitesh Thakkar has joined us as Head Operations and Customer Service.
Currently, the Rs.24 lakh crore MF industry has 39 players. How do you plan to carve a niche for your fund house in terms of client segment?
We realise that the industry is very competitive. Initially, we want to focus on the top 30 cities with a distribution led model. While we are not planning to target any particular client segment, we intend to first focus on existing mutual fund investors. In addition, we are planning to build our presence in B30 cities through digital initiatives.
How will you go about creating awareness about your brand?
We want to start small and stay focussed on our processes and philosophy. We want to build strong relations with our distribution partners and through them our investors by sharing with them our investor centric philosophy and delivering positive experience.
How do you plan to expand your distribution footprint?
We will first establish our physical presence in the top 30 cities. Concurrently, we will connect with distributors and IFAs through meetings and roadshows and share with them our philosophy, and long term vision.
