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Seemant, you have been in this industry for over a decade. In fact, you have worked in the wealth management space. In your experience, what are the three key business areas that MFDs/RIAs should focus on to grow their business and create a future ready business?
MFDs/RIAs should focus on managing client psyche during volatile times.
Other important aspects are asset allocation and self-upgradation regarding innovations in the products segment and offerings. Even if MFDs/RIAs don’t sell any product class, they should make an effort to understand these products or services as clients are now exposed to multiple source of information. Hence, MFDs/RIAs need to be ahead of curve to continue to command trust of their clients.
In my view, MFDs/RIAs must channelize money flow directly or indirectly through multi products or assets offerings. It is better to keep pace with changing market dynamics and client demands. Remember, you will have to become Aadhar Stambh (Pillar) of your client’s financial journey.
Overall, India’s mutual fund industry is expected to grow by leaps and bounds. MFDs/RIAs just need to stay with the client and handhold them with continuous self-learning to grow with the industry.
JM Financial has launched JM Midcap Fund. What is the rationale for launching this fund now?
In the new Avtar, JM Financial Mutual Fund wants to offer all main line products, few are currently missing and our endeavour will be to have these product offerings from our AMC, we did a Short Duration Fund NFO recently with the same thought process.
The midcap fund is an important part of any investor’s portfolio and as well as among the key offering from any asset management company. The midcap universe gives better diversification to participate in the economic growth, which the country will see in the future including some high growth sectors. Midcaps also offer better opportunity to generate alpha compared to large cap; largely due to under research coverage compared to large caps.
Satish Ramanathan’s past experience in investment management especially in the midcap space with other AMCs gives us another reason to launch.
Lastly, our investment team feels that valuation wise, it might be good time to build the midcap portfolio as the correction at stocks level makes a lucrative offering to invest for the longer term.
There are many midcap funds with good track record in the market. In such a scenario, why should MFDs recommend JM Financial Midcap fund to their clients?
The key thought of the new CIO and the team in place is to focus more on consistency of performance with process driven approach, especially with Satish’s views of managing risk-around midcap investments, makes it different.
One of the concepts, which you will see is “Guard Rails”, which defines fund management risk framework even for the equity asset class. While the process will not hamper alpha generation, it will ensure that attendant risks are kept in check. Secondly, Satish and the team’s experience are something which a partner can count on - they are experienced hands with respect to managing investments through multiple cycles of the market in the past.
JM Financial MF will soon complete 28 years. How has the fund house evolved over time and what has changed now that matters to MFDs/RIAs?
There has been change of management team with quite a lot of additions across various verticals from ops to risk, from products to tech, you will see a revived organisation which also has the Trust of JM’s Brand. So, in a nutshell, it’s a great mix of new and energised team (something like a Startup!) along with the platform of one of India’s most trusted BFSI brands
