‘MFDs should identify their core strength and look to reduce costs through alliances’

MFDs should identify their core strength and look to reduce costs through alliances, said Prateek Pant, ED & CBO, WhiteOak Capital MF at a webinar held today by Cafemutual. "Managing costs is crucial. Be brutal when it comes to costs and look to scale the business. As you cannot do everything yourself, look out for partners and solid alliances," he said.

Flexicap experience

The WhiteOak group has been managing over Rs. 40,000 crore in flexicap schemes across offshore funds, PMS and AIF and has delivered good returns across every time frame, thanks to a 'strong' fund management team and our 'OpcoFinco' framework, said Pant.

"WhiteOak may be a new fund house but it has years of experience in wealth management. Not a lot of fund houses have the experience like us of managing over Rs. 40,000 crore in flexicap schemes. We plan to bring this experience to use in mutual funds as well," he said.

The OpcoFinco framework evaluates companies at two levels — Opco and Finco. While Finco looks at the capital and financials, Opco tries to determine the future cash flow potential.

WhiteOak’s plan for MFDs

WhiteOak has already set up around 50 branches across the country and 50 more will come up soon to better connect with MFDs, said Pant, while adding that efforts will be made to keep MFDs informed about WhiteOak's investment processes.

What next?

In August, WhiteOak is likely to come up with a midcap fund, followed by large cap, ELSS and a large & midcap funds.

The fund house wants to focus only on active funds as it believes that there is a lot of alpha generation potential in India, especially in the mid and small cap space.