SEBI is said to have urged AMCs to improve the quality of investor awareness programs and utilize the two basis point of AUM set aside for investor education more intelligently, said two people familiar with the development.
This discussion reportedly took place at the AMFI meeting held in Mumbai yesterday.
The market regulator has suggested that AMFI should not spend huge sums of money on print advertisements and TV commercials; instead, AMCs can use it intelligently by carrying out ground level activities and leveraging digital media platforms to create awareness.
“SEBI has asked us to spend IAP corpus wisely. It has asked us to reach out to the masses through ground level activities and use digital media to create awareness about mutual funds. However, AMFI has not come out with any concrete plan on this yet,” said one of the two people quoted above.
Recently, SEBI had asked fund houses to give 50% of the two basis point corpus meant for investor awareness programs to AMFI.
Based on AUM of Rs. 12.32 lakh crore as on March 2016, AMFI has Rs. 123 crore to invest in creating awareness about mutual funds this year. This means the industry body will get Rs. 10 crore every month from the industry.
Last year, at the CII MF Summit, SEBI Chief U.K Sinha had urged AMCs to improve the quality of investor awareness campaigns and utilize the two basis point of AUM set aside for investor education more effectively. “I would urge the industry to take it up seriously. We can’t be silent spectators. If the corpus is not spent well SEBI would step in and deploy it on its own. I hope this situation would not arise,” said Sinha.
AMFI data shows that 38 AMCs have conducted 10,816 programs in 254 cities covering over 4.74 lakh participants across the country in FY 2015-16.
