Fund officials including CEOs, executive vice presidents and sales head from leading AMCs shared their views on topics like behavioral finance, practice in tough times, significance of beta, emerging global trends in financial advisory and distribution etc. during the recent Network FP Annual Conference 2013 in Mumbai.
Ajit Menon, Executive Vice President, DSP BlackRock MF, emphasized the need of following a niche strategy to grow business. He says, “Floating a niche prospecting strategy may be difficult but once you are established you will gain personal recommendations and referrals from your clientele base. Most of the successful financial planners across the world focus on niche clients and develop a unique approach or process to acquire and retain them.”
While giving a presentation on ‘Alpha Comes from Right Beta’, Aashish Somaiyaa, CEO, Motilal Oswal explained how returns can be maximized even in volatile market with diversification of funds. According to him, if funds will be equally allocated ( say 14.29% each) across seven asset class – liquid, CRISIL G10, Nifty, CNXMCAP, Hang Seng, Nasdaq 100 and gold, it will reduce impact of volatility and ensure optimal returns over a long period of time.
Amar Shah, Senior VP, ICICI Prudential MF, demonstrated the process that his AMC follows for equity investment so that advisers can better understand the operations of fund house. He explained that equity investment involves four steps - security selection by analyst after thorough research, portfolio construction of fund manager, portfolio review of CIO and risk mitigation of risk committee of AMC.
Deepak Chatterjee stressed the importance of spreading financial awareness among people especially in small cities and towns so as to increase the penetration of mutual funds. . Also, he said that the clients have become more self-directed with the use of modern technology like smartphones, internet, tablets etc., hence, financial advisers should have to keep pace with the latest technology in order to provide better services to their clients.
Siddhartha Singh, CEO, PineBridge Investments said the value of a company was in fundamental factors such as management, brand value, future challenges and debt etc. He suggested avoiding leveraged companies in the investment portfolio.
Karan Datta, National Sales Head, Axis MF gave an inspirational presentation to advisers with the theme that they could practice effectively even in tough times. In his presentation, he showed some videos suggesting advisers to never give up.
Kalpen Parekh, CEO, IDFC MF, announced the launch of ‘Behave Yourself’, a program for advisers leveraging the principles of behavioral finance during the conference. He said the program would help advisers to overcome challenges related to client behavior.
