FT Academy goes online in India

FT Academy goes online in India

Launched a decade ago, FT Academy has been a hit among advisors. Now, the academy aims to provide the same experience online in five different languages. Harshendu Bindal, President, Franklin Templeton shares more details about this initiative with Cafemutual.

You started this program ten years back. How has the training program been evolved/changed over the years?

It was a fairly new concept when we started it. People wondered why an AMC would get into training. Wealth management and mutual fund business was new and evolving in India. For a good AMC you need a good distribution force. FT wanted to contribute to the ecosystem for it to grow. We started this training across all channels of distribution like banks, IFAs and national distributors. There was a need for training which we tried to bridge with FT Academy. The initiative has been extremely successful. Thousands of distributors across India have attended the academy training sessions.

But I must add that over the years, the need for training has only increased and we believe that it will grow exponentially going forward.The distribution is very limited in the country for most AMCs. For every one distributor there are hundreds selling insurance. The gap is huge. We need a lot more talent in the mutual fund industry. These new distributors have to be honed. Even banks which hire new people to deal in mutual funds will require training. We want to scale up FT Academy further because the demand is growing.