Over 450 delegates and speakers including financial advisers, industry experts, fund officials and wealth managers gathered at the fourth IFA Galaxy Knowledge Summit held on October 19 in Chennai.
The theme of the event was ‘Retail….The Road to Success’.
AK Narayan, President, IFA Galaxy told Cafemutual “We believe that retail investors stay longer as compared to HNIs since they are more committed to achieve their financial goals. The major challenge ahead is to gain their confidence and motivate them to invest in mutual funds. Hence, our aim was to provide guidance to advisers to attract retail investors in mutual funds.”
Sundeep Sikka, CEO, Reliance MF and Ananta Barua, Executive Director, SEBI were present as the Chief Guest and the Special Guest of the function respectively. Barua urged distributors to register as investment advisers with SEBI. He expressed his resentment as the regulator has received only 70 applications from distributors so far. He explained that SEBI has implemented RIA to curb mis-selling and mis-alignment of incentives.
In a panel discussion on ‘Retail investors expectation from Mutual Funds’ moderated by Vijay Venkatraman of Wealth Forum, industry experts like Aashish Somaiyaa, CEO, Motilal Oswal, KS Rao, Vice President, Birla Sun Life, Raghav Iyengar, Executive VP, ICICI Prudential MF, Aarti Krishnan, Deputy Editor, The Hindu Business Line and Sunil Subramaniam, Director Sales and Global Operations, Sundaram MF deliberated on six areas – simple products, stable performance, effective and simple communication, convenience, growing distribution force and relationship building– in order to attract retail clients.
Suresh Sadagopan of Ladder 7 Financial Advisories suggested advisers to focus on financial life planning and deepen their discussions with clients to engage them. He advised them to provide a clear picture of services and working style to clients so that they can better understand about the service they are paying for.
Mohan Raam, Film Actor as well as Management Trainer 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 encouraging advisers to never give up.
In another panel discussion moderated by Amit Trivedi of Karmayog, speakers from various fund houses and R&T struck an optimistic note on the future of mutual fund industry. The panel discussion moderated by Harish Rao highlighted the importance of understanding the underlying concerns of investors and building a healthy relationship in order to convert them into clients. The speakers also urged financial advisers to keep pace with the latest technology to provide better services to their clients.
Finally, Nitin Tirke, Senior Vice President NISM, explained how upgrading of knowledge could lead to stickiness and ultimately business expansion. He threw light on Continuous Professional Education (CPE) programme offered by NISM.
