Amid the nationwide lockdown and volatile equity markets, the MF industry has added over 2.55 lakh new investors between April and June.
In April, the MF industry added 1.04 lakh unique investors, 53,964 new unique investors in May and 97,597 new investors in June. As a result, the overall unique investors count has risen to 2.10 crore as on June 30, 2020.
If compared with the Jan-Mar numbers, addition of new investors has fallen by nearly 50%. The industry had added 5.08 lakh unique investors in the March quarter.
Nevertheless, experts feel this number to be encouraging given the fact that Apr-Jun has always been a leaner quarter as against Jan-Mar. Moreover, many distributors, advisors and bank RMs rely heavily on in person meetings and physical transactions to onboard clients.
Experts feel that most of the new investors have come via tech platforms where the onboarding is completely digital.
Gaurav Rastogi, CEO at Kuvera.in says that since onboarding in mutual funds is completely digital on their platform, they haven't seen any negative trend during the lockdown quarter. In fact, they have witnessed a rise in addition of new investors in the past couple of months.
Jimmy Patel, MD & CEO, Quantum MF feels a large chunk of these new investors have joined the MF industry through digital platforms to park their money in liquid funds. "Falling FD rates has prompted many investors to invest in liquid funds through these platforms," he added.
